Hemley Boum
Novelist
September 23 through November 10
- Literature
- San Francisco
“I will continue to explore the margins, deserted spaces, and places held within each of us; the hardships encountered in host countries; and the crazed hope and rawness of personal trajectories, whether real or metaphorical, whether intellectual or cultural.”
My name is Hemley Boum. I am a novelist and a poet.
My work focuses on the way exile deconstructs the passing on of ideas, from village to city, continent to continent, culture to culture. I look at what happens when we leave the place where our connections and memory are established; settle down in a new elsewhere and new context; and reinvent ways of communicating, passing on, and adapting. In doing so, I seek to find out how, by appropriating bordered spaces, we inhabit several geographies that exist both physically and internally.
Up until now, my work has been centered primarily on Africa and Europe, where I have organized writing workshops, talks, and training courses on these themes. For several years now in Cameroon, I have led creative-writing workshops aimed at young writers, and I have been working with migrant populations in France and troubled young people. I have also been holding workshops and talks with a group of forty African feminists for the past two years, teaching them how to articulate their commitments through the practice of writing.
The aim to expand my quest into migration writing within this territory of migration, intermingling, and struggle is part of a desire to enrich my individual practice, and to open up to other artistic means of expressing and inhabiting borders.
I will continue to explore the margins, deserted spaces, and places held within each of us; the hardships encountered in host countries; and the crazed hope and rawness of personal trajectories, whether real or metaphorical, whether intellectual or cultural.
Hemley Boum was born in Cameroon, where she studied anthropology before moving to Lille and completing further study in international business. This move saw her swap out the monsoons of Douala for the chilly climes of northern France. Then, after an initial post in Paris, she returned to Cameroon as the key account manager for the Cameroonian branch of a French company.
As an explorer in her own country, she discovered the agri-food, cotton, and timber firms there, gaining a uniquely broad vision of Cameroonian society and international exploitation of local resources. She later went on to live in several other African countries before settling in Paris and finding her preferred form to enter the world of writing.
Hemley has since published four novels that have been translated into six languages. She was awarded the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma in 2020 for her book Days Come and Go; the Grand Prize for Black African Literature and CENE Littéraire Engaged Book Prize in 2016 for Maquisards; and the Ivorian Prize for Francophone Literature in 2013 for Si d’aimer.
Her next novel, Le Rêve du pêcheur, will be published in January.
In partnership with
Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is an independent organization working to address inequality and build a future grounded in justice. For more than 85 years, it has supported visionaries on the frontlines of social change worldwide, guided by its mission to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. Today, with an endowment of $16 billion, the foundation has headquarters in New York and 10 regional offices across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.