Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse (born 1979 in Butare) is a French-Rwandan writer. She won the 2016 Prix François Augiéras. She won the 2023 Prix Ahmadou Kourouma.

Life
Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was born and grew up in Butare. She survived the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and immigrated to France in July1994. She attended a private, Catholic lycée in Beaucamps-Ligny, for three years, on scholarship. During the week she lived in a boarding school and on weekends with a host family. After completing her baccalaureate, she completed the preparatory linguistic and humanities classes (Hypokhâgne and Khâgne) at the Lycée Faidherbe in Lille, obtained a diploma at the Institut d'études politiques (Sciences Po Lille) and then a Diplôme d'études supérieures spécialisées (DESS) in international cooperation and development at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She worked for international NGOs before settling in Bordeaux in 2007, where she coordinates health prevention projects. There she founded and co-supervised an Afro-Caribbean reading circle.

In 2015, she published her first collection of short stories, Ejo, a word that means both "yesterday" and "tomorrow" in Kinyarwanda. Through the voices of women, it tells of the time before and after the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Her second collection of short stories, Lézardes (Cracks), was published in 2017. It contains a group portrait of the author's Rwandan generation, again in short stories between fairy tales and short stories, set before and after the 1994 genocide. A central element of the collection is the impact of this event on the life of children and parents-to-be.

She published her third book, Aprés le progrès (After Progress), a collection of 45 prose poems divided into three parts entitled perdu, volé, racheté (lost, stolen, bought).

She published her first novel, Tous tes enfants dispersés, in the autumn of 2019. It tells the story of a family spanning three generations between France and Rwanda, dealing with the themes of mixing and transmission. It tells through the voices of strong women who reappropriate their history, thus showing the author's feminist streak. The work was very well received by critics and was nominated for several literary prizes (Prix Wepler, Prix André Malraux, Prix Jean Giono, Prix du premier roman of the SGDL). It also received the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie 2020, as well as several other literary prizes.

She published her second novel, Consolée, in the fall of 2022. It is partly inspired by the history of mixed children (Métis belges) who were torn from their black mothers during the Belgian colonial period, to be raised by white nuns in the "Institut pour enfants mulâtres de Save". The fictional text questions the colonial legacy in a broader sense, linking the life of one of these children, who became an old woman in a French nursing home, to the experiences of black people in contemporary France.

Short stories

 * Ejo, La Cheminante, 2015
 * Lézardes, La Cheminante, 2017
 * Ejo - Lézardes et autres nouvelles 2020

Novels

 * Tous tes enfants dispersés, Autrement, 2019 J'ai Lu, 2021
 * English translation: All Your Children, Scattered, translated by Alison Anderson, London 2022, ISBN 978-1-78770-405-3


 * Consolée, Autrement, 2022; J'ai Lu, 2024

Poetry

 * Après le progrès, La Cheminante, 2019