Hemley Boum | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1973 (age 51–52) |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Alma mater | |
Hemley Boum (born 1973) is a Cameroonian novelist. She has received a number of notable awards for her novels, including theGrand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire, thePrix Les Afriques [fr] and thePrix Ahmadou-Kourouma. Her novels have been translated into Dutch and English.
Boum was born in 1973 inDouala,Cameroon.[1] Her mother was a French teacher,[2] and she was the eldest of five children.[3] Growing up, she read European writers at school; she has said "African authors were markedly absent, even in libraries".[4]
Boum studied Social Sciences at theCatholic University of Central Africa inYaoundé, graduating with a master's degree.[5] She subsequently studied international trade at theLille Catholic University and obtained a qualification in marketing and quality from another institution in Lille. In 2009, she moved toParis with her husband and two children.[3][2]
Boum has published five novels as of 2024[update]. She started writing her first novel,Le Clan des femmes, online in blog form. It was published as a book in 2010 and tells the story of an African woman in the early 20th century based on Boum's memories of her grandmother. It also dealt with the topic of polygamy.[6] Boum's second novel,Si d'aimer..., received thePrix Ivoire [fr] award in 2013.[2] Her third novel,Les maquisards, is a historical novel about Cameroon's independence struggles.[4] It received theGrand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire and thePrix Les Afriques [fr] in 2016.[2][7]
In 2019, Boum's fourth novel,Les jours viennent et passent, was published. It is about the lives of three generations of Cameroonian women and the impacts of extremism in Cameroon. It won thePrix Ahmadou-Kourouma in 2020. An English translation,Days Come and Go, was published by BakwaBooks in the United States in 2022.[4] Her fifth novel,Le Rêve du pêcheur (The Fisherman's Dream), was published in 2024 and deals with themes of mental healh and intergenerational trauma.[4][2] The same year, theSciences Po Alumni association awarded its first literary prize to Hemley Boum thanks to this novel.[8] In 2025, the Association of French-Language Writers awarded itsGrand prix Afrique to Hemley Boum for her novelLe Rêve du pêcheur.[9]
