Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (b. 1990, Diourbel, Senegal) is a Senegalese novelist who studied in Paris — at classes préparatoires, then at Sciences Po, and at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He is one of the most internationally recognized African writers of his generation. He publishes with Éditions Philippe Rey and the Senegalese press Jimsaan.

His debut novel, Terre ceinte (2015), received the Grand Prix du roman métis de Saint-Denis and the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma. Silence du chœur (2017) received the Prix Littérature-Monde. De purs hommes (2018) addressed a wave of homophobic violence in Senegal. His fourth novel, La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes (2021), follows a young Senegalese writer in Paris who discovers a legendary, vanished Senegalese novelist — a fictional parallel to the real case of Yambo Ouologuem — and pursues him across libraries, exiles, and literary histories. The novel received the Prix Goncourt in 2021, the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française, and has been translated into many languages. It is a work simultaneously about the novel form, about the African literary tradition and its reception in France, about the politics of literary recognition, and about what it means to inherit a literature that has been suppressed, misread, or erased.