Yanick Lahens grand prize for the novel of the French Academy | EUROtoday

“II invented you on the paths of dreams”writes the Haitian novelist Yanick Lahens (Prix Femina 2014 for Moon tub) on the brink of the novel which she dedicates to her grandmother Régina and her great-grandmother Élizabeth, the 2 successive narrators of Night passengerstwo terribly free girls, whose destinies the author imagined from scraps. Elizabeth, a mulatto, was born in 1818 in New Orleans, this “melting pot” the place folks then blended “aristocratic Creole families, refugees from Saint-Domingue, slaves, freedmen, Native Americans and Americans arriving from the North”… In “the language we spoke”says the narrator, Creole, French, English, generations of ladies converse: Élizabeth listens to her grandmother Florette, “negress…