Véronique Tadjo: Many voices of Francophone Africa from Paris to Johannesburg
– Côte dIvoire (Ivory Coast)
Véronique Tadjo (* 1955) is a writer, poetess, novelist and artist from Côte d’Ivoire. She has lived and worked in many countries of the African continent and the diaspora; she considers herself to be Pan-African. This reflects in her work.
In 1984, she published her first book of poetry, Latérite / Red Earth, for which she received literary prize from the Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique. In 1992, her work was included in the anthology Daughters of Africa. In 1998, she participated in the project Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire (Rwanda: Writing for the sake of Memory) with a group of African writers who travelled to Rwanda to testify of the genocide and its consequences there. Her book L’Ombre d’Imana (2000) emerged from her experiences in Rwanda.
In recent years, she has led creative writing and children’s book illustration workshops in Mali, Benin, Chad, Burundi, Haiti, Mauritius, French Guiana, Rwanda, the United States, and South Africa. In 2006, she participated in the fall residency of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Tadjo has lived in Paris, Lagos, Mexico City, Nairobi, and London. After 2007, she worked in Johannesburg at the University of the Witwatersrand.