A Book of My Own

A BOOK OF MY OWN tells the story of Mukasonga's self: her name, her exile, how her identity took shape - to "rebuild," as she puts it "a lost world from memory and preserve the dignity of humanity."

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A Book of My Own is a work on the experience of exile and migration, memory and selfhood, from legendary French-Rwandan storyteller Scholastique Mukasonga.

For most of her life, Mukasonga was not a writer but a UNESCO social worker. She began writing only in 1994 out of what she called an 'urgency to remember' – her town, her mother, and her thirty-seven family members, who were murdered during the genocide of that year. She recorded everything in a little blue notebook which, in 2006, became an autobiography, Cockroaches.

Mukasonga has since continued to write with similar intent – to 'rebuild a lost world from memory and preserve the dignity of humanity.' In doing so, she has become not only a perennial favourite for the Nobel Prize, but also one of the great humanitarians of our time.