Léonora Miano was born in 1973 in Douala, on the coast of Cameroon, where she spent her childhood and adolescence. In 1991, she moved to France to go to university, where she remained until 2019. Léonora currently lives in Togo and is considered one of the leading voices in contemporary Francophone literature. Her work consists of novels, screenplays and essays, organized into more than twenty books. In Brazil, she has published Contornos do dia que vem vindo (Pallas, 2009), awarded the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2006, and Estação das sombras (Pallas, 2017), winner of the Femina Prize and Gran Prix du Roman Métis in 2013. In 2024, when she comes to Flip, three of the author’s books will be launched. Stardust (Autêntica Contemporânea) is her first novel, shelved for more than two decades and finally available to the Brazilian public. The autobiographical text narrates the moment when the writer, accompanied by her newborn daughter, established herself as an immigrant in France. The novel A imperatriz vermelha (Pallas, 2024), a finalist of the Prix Goncourt in 2019, imagines a prosperous and united African federation from a perspective of Pan-Africanism; while A outra linguagem das mulheres (Pallas, 2024) is an essay on female potential in the sub-Saharan African universe. Translated into several languages, Léonora’s work gained notoriety for its representations of Afro-European populations in France, a context from which stories emerge that discuss, among other themes, the legacies of colonialism and how this legacy is perpetuated in the process of invisibility of minorities.
Translated by: Celina Portocarrero, Graziela Marcolin de Freitas, Dorothée de Bruchard, Carolina Selvatici and Emilie Audigier
