Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. His best-regarded films formed part of the poetic realist movement, and include Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). He published his first book in 1946.
Alexandre Dumas, also known as Alexandre Dumas père, was a French novelist and playwright.
Mélusine or Melusine or Melusina is a figure of European folklore, a female spirit of fresh water in a holy well or river. She is usually depicted as a woman who is a serpent or fish from the waist down. She is also sometimes illustrated with wings, two tails, or both. Her legends are especially connected with the northern and western areas of France, Luxembourg, and the Low Countries.
Anne Hébert, was a Canadian author and poet. She won Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, three times, twice for fiction and once for poetry.
Véronique Tadjo is a writer, poet, novelist, and artist from Côte d'Ivoire. Having lived and worked in many countries within the African continent and diaspora, she feels herself to be pan-African, in a way that is reflected in the subject matter, imagery and allusions of her work.
Boubacar Boris Diop is a Senegalese novelist, journalist and screenwriter. His best known work, Murambi, le livre des ossements, is the fictional account of a notorious massacre during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. He is also the founder of Sol, an independent newspaper in Senegal, and the author of many books, political works, plays and screenplays. Doomi Golo (2003) is one of the only novels ever written in Wolof; it deals with the life of a Senegalese Wolof family. The book was published by Papyrus Afrique, Dakar.
Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant was a French essayist, novelist, and dramatist. He was elected to the Académie française in 1960.
Aniceti Kitereza (1896–1981) was a Tanzanian Catholic cleric and novelist, born in 1896 on the island of Ukerewe, in Lake Victoria, in modern day Ukerewe District of Mwanza Region in Tanzania. In 1945, he wrote the first novel in his native language, Kikerewe. Only in 1981, it was published in Swahili under the title Myombekere na Bugonoka na Ntulanalwo na Bulihwali.
Francis Bebey was a Cameroonian musicologist, writer, composer, and broadcaster.
Marie NDiaye is a French novelist, playwright and screenwriter. She published her first novel, Quant au riche avenir, when she was 17. She won the Prix Goncourt in 2009. Her play Papa doit manger is the sole play by a living female writer to be part of the repertoire of the Comédie française. She co-wrote the screenplay for the 2022 legal drama Saint Omer alongside its director Alice Diop, and Amrita David. In September 2022 the film was selected as France's official selection for Best International Film at the 95th Academy Awards.
Thierry Martens was a Belgian author who wrote science fiction, detective novels, short stories and comics under the pen name Yves Varende.
Jean Joubert was a French novelist, short story writer, and poet.
Marcelle Auclair was a French novelist, biographer, journalist and poet. She published biographies of several important historical figures, translated major historical/literary documents into French from Spanish, and wrote a novel. She also published an autobiographical work, two books on popular psychology, a religious book for children, a book on artistic images of Jesus. Several of her books were translated into English. She was co-founder with Jean Prouvost of the fashion magazine Marie Claire.
Up to the second half of the 20th century, Tanzanian literature was primarily oral. Major oral literary forms include folktales, poems, riddles, proverbs, and songs. The majority of the oral literature in Tanzania that has been recorded is in Swahili, though each of the country's languages has its own oral tradition. The country's oral literature is currently declining because of social changes that make transmission of oral literature more difficult and because of the devaluation of oral literature that has accompanied Tanzania's development. Tanzania's written literary tradition has produced relatively few writers and works; Tanzania does not have a strong reading culture, and books are often expensive and hard to come by. Most Tanzanian literature is orally performed or written in Swahili, and a smaller number of works have been published in English. Major figures in Tanzanian modern literature include Shaaban Robert, Muhammed Said Abdulla, Aniceti Kitereza, Ebrahim Hussein, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Penina Muhando.
Gabriel Ruhumbika is a Tanzanian born novelist, short story writer, translator and academic. His first novel, Village in Uhuru, was published in 1969. He has written several subsequent novels in Swahili. He has also taught literature at a number of universities, and, until his retirement in 2016, he was a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in the USA.
Pierre Lemaitre is a Prix Goncourt-winning French author and a screenwriter, internationally renowned for the crime novels featuring the fictional character Commandant Camille Verhœven.
Jean Giono was a French author who wrote works of fiction mostly set in Manosque in the Provence region of France.
Anna Luisa Pignatelli della Leonessa dei Principi di Monteroduni is an Italian novelist and an aristocrat of German ancestry.
Olivier Barlet is a French journalist, translator, film critic and researcher on African cinema and its diasporas.
