Hemley Boum

"I want to reiterate that this war could not have been fought without the participation of women. Traditional societies, particularly Bassa society, were organized in this way. Women held a sphere of p…"

""The Maquisards" addresses the struggle of Cameroonians for true, complete, and lasting independence. The book adopts this perspective from the point of view of ordinary people, recounting the long ba…"

"I wanted to study my characters in all their human, spiritual, and sociological complexity; to do this, I needed to ground them in a culture. I chose a single location, the Bassa forest, to house my c…"

"My sole commitment as a novelist is to express myself without taboo, with complete freedom. I know that words, public speech, bind the person who utters them. My ideas and biases are very clearly expr…"

"I write the literature I love, an intimate literature that gets as close as possible to people to express human turmoil, the small victories of everyday life, and also what Dickens called "Great Expec…"

"When the "Lire à Douala" association, represented by Christian Wanguè, asked me to be the patron of this event, I immediately jumped at the chance, so much do I love this city. I fell head over heels …"

"Reading is a matter of sensitivity, curiosity, and openness to the world. I would never say that reading makes you a better person: let's be frank, scholars and intellectuals tend to be arrogant and c…"

"It's a real tragedy that books are so expensive and there are so few libraries. I don't have any easy solutions. For my own books, I always negotiate with the publisher to get a much lower price in Ca…"