Louis-Philippe Dalembert (born December 1962) is a Haitian poet and novelist. He writes in both French and Haitian creole. His works have been translated into several languages. He was awarded the Goncourt Prize for poetry for his body of work. He now divides his home between Paris, France, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Life
The son of a school teacher and principal, Louis-Philippe Dalembert was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in December 1962. His father's death, a few months later, drastically affected the economic situation of the family. As a result, he spent his early childhood in the populous neighbourhood of Bel-Air, in a feminine universe. With his mother needing to travel away during the week to teach in the countryside, he grew up surrounded by his mother’s cousins, his elder sister, his great-aunts and his maternal grandmother who controlled her family with the stick, in a Port-au-Prince that was run by the iron-fisted François Duvalier ("Papa Doc"). At the age of six, Dalembert experienced the first great break of his life: his family moved away from that neighbourhood. He drew on these formative very religious years lived under the sign of the sabbath to compose his novel Le Crayon du bon Dieu n’a pas de gomme.
Port-au-Prince, during the 1960s and '70s, was also all about outdoor cinemas, and in particular drive-ins. One of these happened to be located right behind the new house, over the ravine. In the evening, the entire neighbourhood would meet on the empty lot and watch the film. Dalembert saw Westerns, about which he is still mad, the first Kung fu films, and Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 Last Tango in Paris. The problem was that they could not hear anything. They had to imagine the dialogue on their own, when of course someone did not play to the crowd with his own improvisations. Telling from this time forth became for him above all else making one see.
Trained in literature and journalism, Dalembert worked first as a journalist in his homeland before leaving in 1986 for France where he obtained his PhD in comparative literature at the Sorbonne with a dissertation on the Cuban author, Alejo Carpentier, and a master in journalism from the Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme de Paris. Since leaving Haiti, this polyglot vagabond (he juggles seven languages) has lived in Nancy, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, Brazzaville, Kinshasa, Florence, and has traveled wherever his steps have taken him ... in the renewed echo of his native land.
His work carries the trace of his vagabonding [roaming] (a concept he prefers to that of errance [free-wheeling]) in its permanent tension between two periods (a childhood from which he continues to view the world, and adulthood) and two or more spaces. His works have been translated into several languages including English, Spanish, Italian, German, Danish, Portuguese, Greek, Serbo-Croatian...
Today Dalembert lives in-between France and Haiti. He sporadically teaches in universities, such as the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Bern, and Sciences Po Paris as holder of the Writer-in-Residence Chair (2021). He is also known to be an avid soccer fan.
Works
Novels and short stories
Le Songe d’une photo d’enfance, short stories. Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 1993 ; Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2005.
Le crayon du bon Dieu n’a pas de gomme. Paris: Stock, 1996; Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2004. Port-au-Prince: Editions des Presses Nationales, 2006.
L’Autre Face de la mer. Paris: Stock, 1998 ; Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2005. Port-au-Prince: Editions des Presses Nationales, 2007.
L’Ile du bout des rêves. Paris: Bibliophane/Daniel Radford, 2003. Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2007.
Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2005.
Les dieux voyagent la nuit. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 2006.
Histoires d'amour impossibles... ou presque, short stories. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2007.
Noires blessures, Paris: Mercure de France, 2011.
Les Bas-Fonds de la mémoire, short stories. Port-au-Prince, 2012
Ballade d'un amour inachevé, Paris: Mercure de France, 2013 ; Port-au-Prince: C3 Éditions, 2014.
Avant que les ombres s'effacent, Paris: Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2017.
