Sylvie Kandé, Winner of the 2026 French Press Prize
An internationally recognized body of poetry
Sylvie Kandé is the author of three collections of poetry published by Gallimard. Lagon, lagunes. Tableau de Mémoire (2000) has an afterword by Édouard Glissant. La quête infinie de l’autre rive : épopée en trois chants (2011) received the Prix Lucienne Gracia-Vincent in 2017, under the auspices of the Fondation Saint-John Perse. The book was translated into German by Matthes & Seitz and into English as The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three Cantos (Wesleyan University Press, 2022). Gestuaire (2016) received the Prix Louise Labé and was translated into German as Stiller Tausch (Lyrik Kabinett, Hanser, 2024), then into English as Gestuary (Seagull Books, 2026).
Excerpts from her poems, alongside texts by Maya Angelou and Salgado Maranhão, were selected by Yosvany Terry and Alicia Hall Moran for Atlantic Connections, a song cycle commissioned by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts and performed at Farkas Hall and the Harvard Art Museums. Sylvie Kandé’s poems have also appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Po&Sie, Souffle inédit, Transition, Asymptote, and Guernica, as well as in Poésie du Louvre (Seghers), republished by the New York Review of Books as At the Louvre in October 2024.
A graduate of Université Paris VII, Sylvie Kandé contributed to UNESCO’s General History of Africa. A professor in the Department of History and Philosophy at SUNY Old Westbury, she is a member of the Anciens élèves de Louis-le-Grand and of PEN. At New York University, where she founded the Francophone studies program, she received a Golden Dozen Teaching Award. She also holds a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Research & Creative Activities.
Her residency project: revisiting representations of slavery in the United States
Sylvie Kandé’s literary project is set in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period marked in particular by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. It also examines the history of representations of slavery in contemporary America.
Conceived as a “meta-novel,” the project will bring two works into conversation: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, which embodies the rise of American abolitionism and was an immense success in France from the moment it appeared; and Josiah Henson’s autobiographical account, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849), which probably inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe.
The aim is neither to recount a personal encounter nor to decide between a model and its copy, but to imagine the relationship between two narratives that invent and reinvent each other. The novel will also explore the burden that the author-characters, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Josiah Henson, carry in anticipation: that of the figure of Uncle Tom, which has become the trope of an individual’s pathetic acquiescence in their own enslavement.
Through fiction, Sylvie Kandé will examine the avatars of this stereotype, deeply rooted in the language and imagination of contemporary social relations, in the United States and beyond its borders.
Although the project is allegorical in approach, the Jules Verne residency will give her access to essential historical sources, notably the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio, and allow her to immerse herself in the landscapes of the Midwest, essential to understanding the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Josiah Henson.
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