The Collège de France creates the chair 'Francophone Worlds' with Yanick Lahens as its first
The Collège de France, ancestral french higher education and research establishment, just announced the creation of its new chair "Mondes francophones" ('Francophone worlds') in partnership with the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie. As a first step, it should last at least 3 years and involve a new Francophile holder every year. The novelist Yanick Lahens was named its first holder.
Photo by Jean-Pierre Muller/AFP
According to Alain Prochiantz, Collège de France's administrator, this new chair seeks to provide a new forum, research and teaching space to scientists and intellectuals from all Francophone countries. It is about giving the floor to those who contribute to the development of science and thought through francophone countries and the French language. The new chair's idea is to build an organised francophone space into the international world of research and debate of ideas.
Learn more about the first chair holder Yanick Lahens..
Yanick Lahens is a Haitian francophone writer, novelist, teacher and lecturer. She was born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She attended secondary school and university in France, before going back to Haiti to teach at the university . She has written articles, critical essays, books of shorts stories and novels. The theme of slavery and other issues in Haiti and the West Indies is involved many times and dear to her. She won the Prix Femina for her novel Moonbath (originally Bain de lune) in 2014 which was translated by Emily Gogolak and published by Deep Vellum. She also won the Prix RFO and Prix Millepages for The colour of dawn (La couleur de l'aube), published by Seren and translated by Alison Layland.
The author will be giving her inaugural lesson, ' Urgence(s) d’écrire, rêve(s) d’habiter' on March 21st 2019. That first lesson and all of her chair teaching will be broadcasted freely on The Collège de France's website, but also on RFI and TV5 Monde media.
Don't forget to follow the Book Office's official Twitter account for more literary news!