Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr took the literary world by storm with the publication of his fourth novel, “The Most Secret Memory of Men” from 2021, which won the french Prix Concourt of that same year.

It is the thrilling story of the young senegalese writer Diégane who gets his hand on an old book from the 1930s called “The Labyrint of the Inhuman”, written by the long forgotten senegalese writer T. C. Elimane. The book changes his view not only on himself and what literature can be, but makes him obsessed about learning more about the mysterious author. A search that transports him from Paris to Amsterdam, via stories to South America, before he ends up home in Senegal.

Why the violent obsession?

In many ways Elimanes story mirrors Diégane own life, being a writer from Senegal living in Paris, who is being read and judged by a french literary community. His search makes him reflect on what it means to be an african writer in Europe, on who has the right to write about what, and on the complicated history of colonialism whose power dynamics still influences literature today.

“The whole literary history is one big playful plundering”, says Diégane in the book, anticipating this talk with Sarr, where we to him about plagiarism; about Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet who became the first president of Senegal; about Bulgakov, Borges and Bolaño; Sarrs own sources of inspiration; and whether or not poems are still helpfull when trying to seduce a romantic partner.