Bio

Thierry Kehou is a writer and literary translator from French, with a focus on writers from the Black diaspora. His translation of Jean D'Amérique’s A Sun to be Sewn (Other Press) was a 2023 NPR Book of the Day. He is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and a Katharine Bakeless Nason Endowment fellowship from the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. His writing and translations have appeared in Departures, Lampblack, States, and elsewhere, and his translation of Francis Bebey’s Three Little Shoeshiners was longlisted for the 2020 John Dryden Translation Competition. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from Rutgers University-Newark and is a cofounder of the Lampblack Literary Foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting Black writers. He lives with his family in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he serves as the fellowship director of the Fine Arts Work Center.

Project Description

To support the translation of the novel Memory of a Skin by the Guinean author Williams Sassine from French. Sassine (1944-1997) was a critically acclaimed Guinean author of five novels, three plays, and a young adult story collection. Set in an unnamed post-colonial African country, Memory of a Skin follows narrator Milos Kan, an albino civil servant, on his journey to find the acceptance that has escaped him since being abandoned at birth. Narrated over a 24-hour period, Sassine’s fifth and posthumously published novel grapples with marginalized identities, abusive relationships, sexuality, and the unforeseen consequences of human suffering.