It has been described as 'a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land'.Ĭhamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Antan d’enfance. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement.Ĭhamoiseau was born on Decemin Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the creole culture of Martinique and brilliantly translated by Linda Coverdale, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.

Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man's flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing-even otherworldly-ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself. From one of the most innovative and subversive novelists writing in French, a 'writer of exceptional and original gifts' ( The New York Times), whose Texaco won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into fourteen languages, Patrick Chamoiseau's The Old Slave is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly slave's daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his master and a fearsome hound on his heels.

Slave old man by patrick chamoiseau