Seynabou Sonko

Seynabou Sonko (b. 1993, Paris) is a French-Senegalese novelist, musician, and screenwriter. She studied literature at the Université du Québec à Montréal, at the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre in Brussels, and completed a master's degree in literary creation at the Université Paris VIII. She lives and works in Paris and publishes music under the name Naboo.

Her debut novel, Djinns (Grasset, 2023), follows a young Franco-Senegalese woman navigating the psychic and social consequences of French assimilationist politics, spiritual belief, and questions of multiple identity, weaving the mythology of djinns — supernatural spirits in Islamic tradition — through a contemporary urban narrative. The novel received the Prix du Cheval Blanc and the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée (2024). She was a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2024–25, where she developed a feature film screenplay and began a new novel, working with the concept of créolisation and the formal possibilities of genre hybridity — drawing on Édouard Glissant's theoretical framework and on the Italian Giallo tradition. She also contributes to theater, poetry journals (Sabir, Muscle, La Déferlante, Edwarda), and performs her work in live settings.