Hemley Boum

Hemley Boum (born 1973) is a Cameroonian novelist. She has received a number of notable awards for her novels, including the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire, the Prix Les Afriques and the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma. Her novels have been translated into Dutch and English.

Life and career
Boum was born in 1973 in Douala, Cameroon. Her mother was a French teacher, and she was the eldest of five children. Growing up, she read European writers at school; she has said "African authors were markedly absent, even in libraries".

Boum studied Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaoundé, graduating with a master's degree. She subsequently studied international trade at the Lille Catholic University and obtained a qualification in marketing and quality from another institution in Lille. In 2009, she moved to Paris with her husband and two children.

Boum has published five novels. She started writing her first novel, Le Clan des femmes, online in blog form. It was published as a book in 2010 and tells the story of an African woman in the early 20th century based on Boum's memories of her grandmother. It also dealt with the topic of polygamy. Boum's second novel, Si d'aimer..., received the Prix Ivoire award in 2013. Her third novel, Les maquisards, is a historical novel about Cameroon's independence struggles. It received the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire and the Prix Les Afriques in 2016.

In 2019, Boum's fourth novel, Les jours viennent et passent, was published. It is about the lives of three generations of Cameroonian women and the impacts of extremism in Cameroon. It won the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma in 2020. An English translation, Days Come and Go, was published by Bakwa Books in the United States in 2022. Her fifth novel, Le Rêve du pêcheur (The Fisherman's Dream), was published in 2024 and deals with themes of intergenerational trauma.

Works

 * Le Clan des femmes, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010 ISBN 978-2-296-12847-7
 * Si d'aimer…, Ciboure: La Cheminante, 2012 ISBN 978-2-917598-69-6
 * Les maquisards, Ciboure: La Cheminante, 2015 ISBN 978-2-371270-22-0
 * Les jours viennent et passent, Paris: Gallimard, 2019, ISBN 978-2-07-284918-3
 * (Dutch translation: De dagen komen en gaan, 2020, ISBN 978-949308173-4)
 * (English translation: Days Come and Go, 2022, ISBN 978-1-7337526-9-5)
 * Le Rêve du pêcheur, Paris: Gallimard, Collection Blanche, 2024, ISBN 978-2-07-303242-3