Camara Laye

(1928 - 1980)

Born in French Guinea in 1928, Camara Laye won an academic scholarship to travel to Paris, working as an auto mechanic, earning an engineering degree, and publishing his first two novels, The Dark Child and The Radiance of the King. In the late 1950s he settled back in Guinea, where he worked as an engineer in the colonial administration before he served as a diplomat in the newly independent nation, led by President Sékou Touré. Disagreeing with some of the president’s policies, Laye went into self-imposed exile in 1965 and died in Senegal in 1980.