Véronique Tadjo

Véronique Tadjo is a writer, poet, novelist and illustrator from Côte d'Ivoire, born in Paris in 1955. She is widely regarded as one of the leading voices in contemporary African and diaspora literature, and her work reflects a pan-African outlook that is not tied to a single place.

She grew up in Abidjan and travelled widely with her family. Her father was an Ivorian civil servant and her mother, French, was a painter and sculptor. Tadjo studied literature in Abidjan and earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne with a thesis on African-American culture and slavery. A Fulbright scholarship took her to Washington. She taught in her own country, then lived in Nigeria, Kenya, Mexico and South Africa before settling in London.

Her first book, a poetry collection called Latérite, appeared in 1984. Her novels deal with memory, women's lives, neocolonialism and political corruption. She blends traditional oral storytelling with a modern prose style and aims to stay close to real life. Her time in Rwanda after 1998 inspired L'ombre d'Imana. Her work belongs to a generation of African women writers who speak openly about their own experience, and her novel Reine Pokou won the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 2005.