In 1989, Gilbert Ahnee, a then-rising figure of Mauritian journalism, ventured into the world of fiction with the release of Exils (Exiles), his first and only novel to date. Published by Éditions du Centre de Recherches Indianocéanique, Exils is an intimate inquiry into self-banishment and belonging, described by Charles Bonn and Xavier Garnier in Littérature francophone: Le roman (Éditions Hatier, 1997) as a largely autobiographical novel that was written upon Ahnee’s return to Mauritius after a period of study in France, illustrating the sense of exile that is felt even by those living in the very heart of the homeland—the novel being an explicit cri d’amour, or cry for love, for the French language.
Thirty-five years later, in 2024, Exils was introduced to the Anglosphere when The White Review, a London literary magazine, included a translated excerpt in an anthology celebrating fiction and nonfiction prose from across the world. The translator, Ariel Saramandi, is a British-Mauritian essayist whose book Portrait of an Island on Fire (forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions this June 2025) was described as ‘a searing account of Mauritius’. Her translation offers a delicate rendering of Ahnee’s prose, sustaining its emotional nuances while opening it up to a new audience.
In this interview, I spoke with Ahnee and Saramandi, both in Mauritius, on the resonances of Exils in today’s world and the evolving legacy of exile in Francophone Mauritian novels.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The excerpt of Exils (Exiles) published in The White Review’s ‘Writing in Translation’ anthology (in Ariel Saramandi’s translation) bespeaks alienation—cultural, geolinguistic, spiritual—mixed up with indifference, boredom, and frustration. I love that we have the character Jean Louise, in his quarter-life crisis, who embodies how exile gnawingly takes on different shapes:
But I felt that true apathy of not being able to share in their pleasures. I was indifferent to the sea. The sea and its transient vehemence, always the same.
Gilbert, could you take us back to the years leading up to the novel’s publication in 1989? Could you share insights into your creative process?
Gilbert Ahnee (GA): When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, I was 16. I felt, deeply, that my generation would make an unprecedented, but as yet undefined, contribution to our country’s evolution. As a matter of fact, the most groundbreaking changes of the time—political, societal, cultural—were brought about by those who came back from university. My high school classmates were preparing to go abroad, but my family couldn’t afford to sponsor my university education and so I landed a secondary teaching job as an undergraduate physics teacher. In class I taught physics to young boys and adolescents, but in the staff room I benefited from senior colleagues’ advice as regards to literature. I first started by reading nineteenth-century authors: a few English writers, but many more French and Russian novelists such as Zola, Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. That was my first real exposure to the novel. Over the years, I kept on consolidating that interest for novels from around the world, from Truman Capote to William Boyd, Mark Behr to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mario Vargas Llosa to Gabriel García Márquez, Orhan Pamuk to Pierre Lemaitre. My curiosity for novels is unquenchable. I’m happy that readers noticed, in Exils, allusions to the world of Camus and Proust.
AMMD: Ariel, what inspired you to translate Exils, a French novel published nearly four decades ago, into English? What significance does the novel hold for you as a British-Mauritian writer who grew up in Mauritius?
Ariel Saramandi (AS): This is such a wonderful, intricate question! So perhaps, to start: I’ve used ‘British-Mauritian’ a lot in describing myself abroad, not so much out of a sense of dual nationality—though I am indeed both British and Mauritian—but because all the essays I produced until November 2024 were written under an autocratic government regime. Saying I was ‘British’, even if I never really felt British, was a way for me to signal—hopefully!—that I couldn’t be charged with defamation or imprisoned without the British embassy knowing about it. Asserting my dual nationality in that way felt like a ‘word of warning’ to Mauritian authorities, a ‘technique’ that felt ridiculous—I’ve never been to the British embassy in my life or know anyone who works there. But I’ve also never been troubled, politically, for my work.
I was born in London because my mother couldn’t be treated for her various medical issues locally in 1992. I spent a month there upon my birth, then returned here. Beyond the four years I spent studying in England I’ve never lived anywhere else. But that doesn’t stop a number of Mauritians from considering me as ‘not properly Mauritian’ because of my (locally famous) British father. I suspect what they really mean is that, because of my social class and because of my mixed ethnicity (I am Creole, but light-skinned with straight hair), I am a marginalized figure that doesn’t fit into the prescribed ethnic-religious-class categories of Mauritian life.
I loved Exils upon the first read. I knew how acutely it felt to be torn between home (Mauritius) and the richness of an intellectual and artistic life abroad (the worlds of Paris and London). I felt that pain not because of my dual citizenship (ha!) but because, like many Mauritians studying abroad, I became aware of the possibilities that existed for people like me; it was only as an undergraduate that I discovered, for instance, that I could become a lecturer. It was a mundane realization, but it blew me away that this was a job I could aspire to: I could spend many years imbued in literature, teaching it, writing about it, in a way that I couldn’t do back home. That was in 2012, though; by the time I’d finished my master’s degree in 2016, funding for arts and humanities in the United Kingdom had been severely cut. I handed in my dissertation a few days before the Brexit vote. I felt like I needed to go back home, reassess. I never left. And adapting back to Mauritian life was difficult for a few years—less difficult now, but still lonely. Upon my return, for instance, I was constantly asked when I’d get married, when I’d have children, not so much from my own parents but from the people who surrounded me.
And there are two things I didn’t want to ‘fall into’, as it were: the first thing I tried to avoid was to adopt a universally condescending attitude about my country, the kind that sneers at everything and everyone, and that simultaneously pines for an imagined life abroad. The second was a kind of resigned ‘concentrate on the glass half full’ attitude, the one that concentrates almost purely in seeking contentment and doesn’t want to criticise or investigate anything at all. I think it’s an attitude that leads to an indolence, a certain disengagement with the country and its problems. It’s an attitude one sees most obviously with the wealthy here, but it’s one of those insidious belief systems you can find everywhere: ‘ah, you should be grateful, you have all these extraordinary lagoons and beaches, you can go swimming every weekend’. So to see, from the very first, a protagonist like Jean Louise who gazes listlessly at the sea, feeling apathetic – that was a revelation to me. That you could do that, and think that, and still live here.
I love and respect the way that Jean Louise finds a way to exist in Mauritius, and that his particular existentialism is borne out of love, despite his longings. A way to exist within the limitations of the island, which he accepts. He is not angry, he does not condescend, he is quiet, reflective, and the work he does—his actual work, but also how he chooses to shape his life—is radical. No other book I’ve read is like it.
I realise now that I’ve answered the second part of the question without replying to the first. I read Gilbert’s columns for years in the newspaper and met his brilliant son Marek before meeting him. I was delighted to find, in his whole family, people of remarkable intelligence, emotional depth, and humility. Marek has been a close friend for many years, and I am honoured that he reads and comments on my work, my ideas; without him I wouldn’t have my collection of essays. So when he gave me the only copy he had of Exils to read I was thrilled. In the beginning I started translating the novel without telling either of them! I felt such a kinship with the book that I wanted to inhabit it in a way beyond reading.
AMMD: Both of you are primarily known for your work as journalists and essayists. I’m curious about how this background influenced your creative processes: Ariel, how did the transition from crafting original nonfiction prose in English to translating fiction from French shape your approach? Gilbert, how did your experience as a journalist inform your shift to writing a novel, where the narrative may or may not adhere to literal truth?
AS: It was such a revelatory experience, in that translating was challenging in a different way than I’d expected—it was so tricky! I’d done work as a translator before, but for corporate texts. Literature is a whole other universe. I’d have endless sentences highlighted in different shades, slashed to make room for alternative words, alternative sentence constructions. I’d agonise over diction. Sometimes the most accurate word in English wouldn’t convey the spirit of the word in French as it was deployed in the novel. It took many, many attempts before I felt satisfied with my translations of Gilbert’s prose.
GA: Journalism is all about dealing with facts—investigating unknown situations, verifying and cross-checking potentially relevant information. The creative process of fiction, on the other hand, operates on a completely different plane. Authors have the absolute freedom to craft their narratives however they see fit. That said, I’ve always been fascinated by novelists who can structure their stories with the precision and depth of a news story or an investigative report. Writers like Truman Capote, Joël Dicker, and Chetan Bhagat come to mind as masters of this art.
AMMD: Ariel, your debut essay collection, Portrait of an Island on Fire, is forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions this June. Could you share more about it?
AS: I started writing essays seriously around 2017. I needed a form that would be more accommodating than conventional journalism for the subjects I was interested in, a more expansive vessel that I could shape to contain different strands of thought and research. I historicise. I write about my country and also of myself and my own experience, because the personal is political. Which just means, basically, that I write long, meandering essays that hopefully have a shape, and I am very grateful to the editors that I’ve worked with throughout the years for teaching me how to build shape, to trim, to flesh an idea out as fully as possible.
All of the essays in the book started out with a deep concern for social justice, which is the reason why I entered Mauritian politics too, as a background type of person who does research. The essays explore language (and its inherent class politics) but also the rights of immigrants, racism, misogyny and femicide, and climate change. The largest essay, ‘10 Years in Power’, is an account of the (former!) party in power’s hold over the country and the attempts of minority parties and activists to make a space for themselves in this climate of repression.
I am so honoured that Fitzcarraldo Editions acquired the collection and immensely grateful to Natasha Soobramanien, who told them about my work. Natasha is an extraordinary writer, and I’d urge anyone reading this to read DIEGO GARCIA, which she wrote with Luke Williams.
AMMD: In Littératures francophones (1996), Michel Hausser and Martine Mathieu described Exils as a debut novel ostensibly sustained by personal memory, bearing witness to an irreversible estrangement. I’m curious: how autobiographical is the novel?
GA: Readers who know me can easily distinguish the fictional elements from those rooted in autobiography. My life, professional experience, neighbourhood, social profile, and overall narrative are worlds apart from Jean Louise’s. That said, I’m tempted to describe Exils as the autobiography of my generation.
I gathered memories and confessions shared by friends and acquaintances, creating very few of the situations or atmospheres myself. Instead, I focused on weaving these fragments of life into what I hoped would be a cohesive story. In this construct, the autobiographical element lies more in the adhesive that binds the pieces together than in the pieces themselves.
AMMD: The scholar Jean-Louis Joubert, in his Littératures de l’océan Indien (1991), brought a case of the dilemma in separating the Mauritian novelistic tradition from the Mauritian literature of exile as a whole. Joubert went on to canonise Exils with that of the noteworthy novels by exiled Mauritians like Loys Masson, Jean Fanchette, and Marie-Thérèse Humbert. In the sea of writings on exile within Mauritian literature, where does Exils come in and how does it speak to that literary tradition?
GA: When Exils was written, there was no Internet. We had no way of knowing which books had been published, what questions were being debated in the latest magazines, which movies were being shown, or which plays were being staged in New York, Delhi, London, or Paris. I don’t think I could write a novel today comparable to my 1989 attempt.
Despite the title of my book and its characters’ various exilic situations, I’ve never indulged in existential lamentation about exile—or its celebration. That said, I did feel a sense of deprivation. I loved movies, yet almost none were screened on my island, and satellite dishes were banned. I loved books, but I couldn’t afford to buy recent publications, and public libraries were rarely updated.
From the mid-1990s onward, digital access to images, texts, and music pulled us out of isolation—both intellectually and emotionally. As for the authors you mention, I truly admired Marie-Thérèse Humbert’s À l’autre bout de moi. However, I must admit that the works of the other two writers didn’t resonate deeply with me, at least based on the few I browsed through.
AS: It seems to me that it’s a literary tradition as old as colonialism in Mauritius. The earliest accounts are the narratives of Frenchmen in the island, then Englishmen, Irishmen, and American travellers who feel the need to compare countries, and perhaps then reckon with their own selves. The most interesting account in that vein, I think, is Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Voyage à l’Ile-de-France. It’s famous for its denunciations of the horrors of slavery, but the passages in which he describes being homesick are also an interesting read, since it portrays a man grappling with a gruesome system that his own countrymen have forced upon a land they claim as their own, about the construction of identity within a colony.
You’re right to describe it as a ‘sea’. I don’t think it’s possible to separate Mauritian literature in exile from non-exilic texts, and I’d argue that it’s especially important not to do this with Creole writers, who’ve had to emigrate time and time again throughout Mauritian history because of unrelenting racism.
I’m thinking, too, of all the writers I know who live abroad, who find it very difficult to live in Mauritius. Their novels are still part of the Mauritian canon, even if they haven’t actually lived here for years.
Another aspect that makes Exils truly special is that I hadn’t encountered in Mauritian literature a ‘return of the prodigal child’ novel that treats a sense of (un)belonging in such a composed, thoughtful way before. In other books, I’d see the protagonist grapple with anger or condescension about their home upon their return—that, or they’d go the other way, turning Mauritius into a mystical-romantic-exotic vision (I am thinking of Malcolm de Chazal here). Exils breaks, in the best way possible, with what has been published before.
AMMD: In a November 1995 issue of Le Mauricien, you wrote about the inauspicious future of the French language beyond Mauritius: ’Without being excessively pessimistic regarding the future of francophonie, in one century French will perhaps not have more international presence than Czech or Polish today’. Have you changed your mind about this pronouncement you made from thirty years ago?
GA: At the time, Mauritius was unnecessarily polarized around languages—specifically, around their instrumentalization in order to gain access to highly sought-after schools. With elections approaching, and given our past exposure to inflammatory rhetoric, it seemed wise at the time to present our diverse linguistic heritage in a fairer, less divisive light.
It’s worth noting that, thirty years later, there are now approximately twice as many English-medium international schools worldwide as there are French-medium ones. In the same period, Rwanda—under Kagame’s leadership—has shifted from a predominantly francophone country to a globally oriented, English-speaking outpost of the Global South. Just recently, two historically francophone nations, Togo and Gabon, joined the Commonwealth. These developments raise intriguing questions: how will they shape the choice and use of languages going forward?
When Exils was published, some suggested that the book was a love letter to the French language. If memory serves me right, my relationship with French has been equally celebrated and chastised. I’ve been ridiculed for an alleged post-colonial indulgence in it and even served formal notices—mises en demeure—for using French at home or speaking it with my mum, aunties, and old school teachers. It’s a curious duality, isn’t it?
AMMD: Mauritius, a former colony of both the French and British Empires, is home to a vibrant multilingual milieu where Mauritian Creole (Kreol Morisien), Bhojpuri, French, and English are spoken by people of Indian, Creole, Chinese, and French ancestries. Could you both share how this multilingual and multicultural environment has shaped your experiences? How did that give rise to the languages, styles, and themes you explore in your work as writers and translators?
AS: This is an excellent question and unfortunately, I feel like I can’t do it justice here—I’ve written about this for my essay collection and it’s over two thousand words! Gilbert will no doubt be more succinct. There’s an important class axis to my own linguistic education: my mother was brought up in a lower-middle-class Creole family in the 1960s, and it was not ‘done’ to speak Kreol Morisien at home. And so my mother, without thinking too much about it, chose not to speak to her children in Kreol too, assuming I’d just learn it from the people around me. And I did. Also, I think she thought it was the safest choice that wouldn’t get her any rebukes from the new society she’d found herself in, since she’d greatly changed social class once she’d married my father.
I was raised in French (my mother), English (my father and my mother), Kreol, and Bhojpuri (the people who cared for me when I was younger). I went to an international primary school when I was a child, but as soon as we learned that we wouldn’t emigrate my mother chose a ‘normal’ Mauritian school for me, run by the Diocese, where I spoke French. My final school years were spent in a state school, where students spoke Kreol, English, and Bhojpuri; they also taught me smatterings of Hindi. Today, I speak in a mix of French, Kreol, and English, like my husband and my children. My friends speak much in the same was, too, though the ‘ratio’ of each language changes depending on the person.
Our rich Kreol language and its expressions reflect the complex inheritance and legacies of our history. There’s a website I like called Mauricianismes, which sadly hasn’t been updated since 2020. It’s a little Francophonic, but it is replete with definitions and investigations on the origins of Kreol and Kreolised words and the way they’re used today. There are some famous ones, like ‘ayo’, used to indicate everything from surprise to disappointment to shock to sadness, and which has its origins in Tamil.
Marek’s been a wonderful source of information on Kreol too. From him I learned that ‘mantinva!’, used to show annoyance and disappointment by my mother and aunts, is in fact a very particular, very old Creole expression taken from the Malagasy ‘mate va’, which means something like ‘oh, death!’
As a writer, translator and most of all reader, I appreciate it tremendously when I see characters speaking in a way that feels true to themselves. Which is to say, it’s easy to add an ‘ayo!’ or other interjection to make a character feel superficially Mauritian, but what of the cadences of their speech, the rhythms of their banter, their word choices? Gilbert does this brilliantly in Exils. It’s such a wonderful thing to be immersed in a world that I have kinship with. It was crafted with such intelligence and skill. Even the characters’ names—there’s a character who appears later on called Liseby. I howled when I got to the page. Liseby! So incredibly apt!
Another writer who is fantastic at dialogue is Lindsey Collen. Her characters speak in English, but even in the English you can tell, immediately, what the phrase was ‘originally’ in Kreol. She’s extraordinarily good at translating expressions from one language to another without losing the Kreol essence of the word. In her novel Getting Rid of It, for instance, there is a character who works as a street hawker. In Kreol, that job is called ‘marsan ambulan’. But Collen doesn’t use ‘hawker’; she chooses to write ‘seller of wares’. And it is perfect.
GA: Mauritians show forth a variety of linguistic combinations and abilities. Practical linguistic skills range from an exclusive use of Creole to fluency, or near fluency, in up to six languages: a) the adopted identity idiom learnt during primary (or religious) schooling; b) a “grand-mother tongue”, Bhojpuri, Hakka, or French, attached to as a matter of heritage; c) general widespread use of Creole; and d) growing ability to communicate in English, at least in its written form, inherited from secondary education. In my as yet unpublished short stories and, hopefully, any more extended writing ahead, I try to place my characters in realistic language context, choosing Creole, English, or French, whatever provides an authentic flavour to the quote, even Indian languages, when I can draw a relevant expression from common parlance.
AMMD: Is there a centre-periphery tension between Metropolitan French, other dialects of French, and French-based Creoles, such as Mauritian Creole? If so, how is this dynamic reflected in Francophone writing and publishing on a global scale?
GA: There may be a continental French—or hexagonal—viewpoint tempted to assimilate Creoles to French, but it doesn’t seem to really work, neither in the West Indies, nor Réunion Island, nor, the more so, Mauritius. In the 1990s, inter-alia under Mitterrand, there was a Paris-centered perspective explicitly favouring the view that a growing use of Creole would support as well that of standard French. This led to a dead end. I shall not comment on the respective situations of Creole and French in ultramarine French territories. As regards to Mauritius, we do have some writers in Creole, and able translators into that language as well; we have few writers in English and quite a number in standard French. This includes some big names such as Ananda Devi and Nathacha Appanah, both published by the most prestigious Parisian publishing houses and selected for top awards.
AS: I don’t think it’s a tension at this point. I don’t know of anyone—of my generation at least, and who resides in Mauritius—who tries to ‘cleanse’ their French of all possible Mauritian influences, in order to make it more ‘Metropolitan’. Speaking French ‘well’ definitely has a sense of prestige to it in Mauritius, but the funny thing is that often this same ‘well-spoken French’ is Kreolised.
AMMD: I would like to know your take as writers from the Global South working in dominant languages (such as English and French): Given translation’s colonial legacy and history, how can we work towards an anti-imperialist and decolonial publishing industry?
AS: Derek Walcott was a formative influence on me, in my late teens and early twenties. I found it incredible how he embraced the colonial legacies that forged his ancestries and his tongue, how he rebuked shame. And there is a lot of shame that is unfortunately tied to language; Walcott writes about how his accented St. Lucian English was considered inferior, and how wonderful it felt when, upon seeing a Shakespearean play, he could hear his supposedly ‘inferior accents’ in Shakespeare’s Early Modern English.
So I’m all for freeing us and the languages we choose to speak from shame, but while recognizing and grappling with the fact that language and power are inextricable.
A true anti-imperialist and decolonial publishing industry should probably start at home, with the translation of as many books as possible into Mauritian Kreol, so that the majority of people here who have Kreol as their mother tongue can enjoy them. We don’t have a lot of control as to what will be published abroad or what will end up in a university syllabus, but I think it’d be great if the work of our authors – contemporary and historic – finds an international audience in a variety of languages. Jeffrey Zuckerman and Frank Wynne have admirably translated books by Carl de Souza, Ananda Devi, and Nathacha Appanah. My friend Aqiil Gopee, along with Jeffrey Diteman, has recently translated Les Marrons, the only known novel by Black abolitionist and political exile Louis Timagène Houat. As an aside, I’m also really happy to say that my Mauritian friend and writer Yagnishsing Dawoor reviews books from all over the world for places like The Guardian, introducing me and thousands of other readers to authors like Kobby Ben Ben, Magogodi oaMphela Makhene, and Ruthvika Rao.
GA: I’d add, too, that the démarche adopted by UNESCO for its Collection of Representative Works could be emulated, providing translation facilities to major works created in minority languages.
AMMD: What is the literary scene in Mauritius like today? Mauritian writers, like Ananda Devi, Khal Torabully, Umar Timol, Caroline Laurent, and Carl de Souza are gaining recognition in the Anglosphere. Are there other Mauritian novelists (whether writing in Mauritian Creole, Bhojpuri, French, English, or other local languages) whom you wish to be read more globally or translated further?
GA: Among the writers you mentioned above, I’m personally moved by Ananda Devi and Umar Timol, equally Nathacha Appanah who, as mentioned above, is already a powerful novelist. Concerning the diversity of languages, I deeply regret my scanty knowledge of Indian languages, specially Tamil, Hindi, and Urdu which have given rise to some powerful pages.
AS: I’m going to talk about the writers I love and recommend later, so I’m going to use this space to do something controversial but necessary.
There is an unfortunate tradition, at this point, of anti-Black racism in Mauritian literature by a number of our authors. I thought it would disappear with newer writers from Mauritius, but it has not. Some are famous internationally; some are only famous in Mauritius. Beyond conversations with friends, I don’t see this racism pointed out publicly or written about at all, though it is glaring. These authors write Creole Mauritian characters that are empty, vacuous symbols of poverty, suffering, and despair. They are flimsy, unable to exist outside of their suffering—a suffering imagined by non-Creole, non-working-class authors.
I’m not being prescriptive here, saying that Mauritian authors should only write within their identities. But it takes great time and care to portray characters well. I think of Alexander Chee’s three questions that he poses to writers who want to write characters different to themselves: 1) Why do you want to write from this character’s point of view? 2) Do you read writers from this community currently? 3) Why do you want to tell this story?
These are clearly not the questions that a number of Mauritian writers are asking themselves. Some books were clearly written to capitalise on subjects that gained traction in the news, such as the Chagossian fight to return home and Black Lives Matter. Some authors intended to ‘capture and portray’ (verbs so redolent of colonialism) minority ‘experiences’, ‘subaltern suffering’.
AMMD: If you were to design a course on ‘The Mauritian Novel’, which novels would you consider essential to include as key texts? Are there particular novelists you would prioritise for this imaginary syllabus?
GA: Ananda Devi’s Le Sari vert, Natasha Appanah’s Tropique de la violence, Bertrand de Robillard’s Une interminable distraction au monde, and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Whitman.
AS: This is really tough, because many of our novelists are prolific. Gilbert’s choices are excellent. His novel should be on the syllabus, too. I’d also add Natacha Appanah’s Blue Bay Palace, Lindsey Collen’s Mutiny and Misyon Garson, Natasha Soobramanien’s DIEGO GARCIA, Marie-Therese Humbert’s A L’Autre Bout de Moi, Renée Asgarally’s Quand montagne prend difé. The following are not novels but are essential reading: Rene Noyau’s poems, Azize Asgarally’s play Ratsitatane, Henry Favory’s play Anjalay, and Dev Virahsawmy’s play Li.
As a final note, I’d like to say that I’m impatiently awaiting the works of my generation of writers, and works authored by Chagossians and those of Chagossian descent.
Gilbert Ahnee has served as editor-in-chief of a leading Francophone newspaper in Mauritius, Le Mauricien (The Mauritian, 1996 to 2009). Formerly the editor-in-chief of the weekly Le Nouveau Militant (The New Militant), he also served as a correspondent to Kanal Océan Indien and occasionally contributed to Radio France Internationale. He now works as a freelance writer. He has authored Exils (Exiles), his first and only novel so far, which was published by Editions du Centre de Recherche Indianoceanique in 1989.
Ariel Saramandi is a Mauritian writer. Her work has been published in Granta, The White Review, PEN Transmissions, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She has reported about Mauritius for the BBC and NBC News. She was awarded a grant by the Society of Authors in 2024 for Portrait of an Island on Fire, her debut essay collection, which will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in June 2025. She is a member of the MMM Commission de Développement Durable. Visit her website at https://arielsaramandi.com.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines and the author of three books of lyric essays and prose poems including M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, The White Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Pan Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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