Yanick Lahens, Grand Prix du Novel 2025

The talented Haitian writer had little information about her ancestors, descendants of slaves, but from these scraps, she created an ample and vibrant work, which highlights the life force of these women who came from far away.

At the start, there is a Haitian general, mustachioed, in a frame, his great-grandfather; and then two sisters of the family, with light skin, who would have landed from New Orleans in Haiti… That’s all. The documentation that the novelist has collected and her talent as a storyteller will do the rest, all the spice of this 19th century epic, between Saint-Domingue (French colony which will become Haiti) and Louisiana. Divided into two parts, the novel follows in the first the destiny of Elizabeth, a young quadroon (daughter of a mulatto and a white man) in a bustling and mixed New Orleans, where a thousand goods are exchanged. The young woman rejects the advances of an associate of her father… with a knife. And will have to go into exile… choosing to return to the land of these ancestors, Haiti.

The second part takes place in the bustling and dangerous Port-au-Prince, capital of the brand new Republic established by Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Toussaint Louverture in 1804. There, the narrator Regina recounts, chants, honors her general, her lover, her man… Elizabeth’s son!

Yanick Lahens, born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince, achieves with this dense novel a magnificent tribute to all these slave women and their descendants who knew how to juggle with an apparent docility, keeping deep in their hearts or in their “sky scarf”, a square of fabric tied on the head, their independence, their interiority. She received the Femina Prize in 2014 for Moon Bath.