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French-Rwandan Gael Faye is an author, composer and hip hop artist. He was born in 1982 in Burundi, and has a Rwandan mother and French father. In 1995, after the outbreak of the civil war and the Rwandan genocide, the family moved to France. Gael studied finance and worked in London for two years for an investment fund, then he left London to embark on a career of writing and music. He is as influenced by Creole literature as he is by hip hop culture, and released an album in 2010 with the group Milk Coffee & Sugar. In 2013, his first solo album, Pili Pili sur un Croissant au Beurre, appeared. It was recorded between Bujumbura and Paris, and is filled with a plethora of musical influences- rap laced with soul and jazz, semba, Congolese rumba... In 2018 he received the prestigious Victoires de la Musique Award. Small Country is his first novel. It was a huge bestseller in France, winning the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens 2016, and is being published in thirty territories worldwide.
an excellent novel, a model of restraint and quiet literary sophistication * Sunday Times * [A] luminous debut novel… This is a book that demanded to be written... With a light touch, Faye dramatises the terrible nostalgia of having lost not only a childhood but also a whole world to war -- Nadifa Mohamed * Guardian * An evocative portrait of what it means to lose one’s freedom and innocence. Gaël Faye’s literary powers lie in his unbridled honesty and his effortless prose. He is a writer of great promise and grace -- Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen Unforgettable… Gaël Faye’s talent is breathtaking; no country that can give the world a writer like him should ever be called small -- Imbolo Mbue, author of Behold the Dreamers as beautiful as it is painful... It's easy to see why it set the French literary scene alight. This is one you won't be abandoning in the hotel library when you leave. -- Sam Baker * The Pool * a masterpiece in bringing home the first-hand realities of war... It's heart-wrenching and beautiful and distressingly authentic. Everyone should read it. * The Pool * This beautiful coming-of-age novel conveys a heart-rending desire for peace and harmony. It sets forth a vision of the world that is poetic rather than political, where horror is displaced by wonder. * Le Figaro * A magnificent book… a master-stroke of a first novel * Le Parisien * Precise and potent...deeply affecting... The juxtaposition of everyday growing pains and the fallout from atrocities is heightened by Faye's lovely prose, which builds a heartrending portrait of the end of childhood * Publishers Weekly * Gaël Faye’s words are a mix of such precision, gentleness and gravitas that finishing this first novel feels like coming out of a heartrending embrace. * Le Point *
