Imbolo Mbue

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Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue (* 1982 in Limbe , Cameroon ) is an American writer . She received the PEN / Faulkner Award in 2017 for her debut novel Behold the Dreamers (German: Das Traumte Land ) .

Life

Imbolo Mbue grew up in Limbe, a coastal town in southwest Cameroon. At 17, she went to the United States, where relatives funded her education. She attended Rutgers University in New Jersey , moved to New York, and graduated from Columbia University . She then worked in market research for a media company. As a result of the American financial crisis , Mbue lost her job and was unemployed for a year and a half. According to her own statements, she was disillusioned with life in the USA and the American Dream , which is not available to everyone. At that time she toyed with the idea of ​​returning to Cameroon.

The starting point for her debut novel Behold the Dreamers was an observation that Mbue made in front of the Time Warner Center on New York's Columbus Circle : Black chauffeurs were waiting for their mostly white passengers, all of them company executives. Mbue imagined the life of African immigrants, managers and their respective families. Questions about immigration , race and social class gave rise to the story of a couple from Cameroon who emigrated to the USA and hoped for the American Dream, but were confronted with the reality of the financial crisis and the impending deportation . Their fate is mirrored in the American family of a Lehman Brothers manager , with whom they find work.

In 2011 Mbue began working on the novel, which lasted five years. The title of the novel goes back to the poem Let America be America Again by Langston Hughes , in which Mbue was fascinated by the line “let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed” (“let America be the dream, the dreamer dream”). She decided that the dreams of her protagonists should be at the center of the novel. Mbue received a million dollar advance payment for the novel. She was represented by Susan Golomb, Jonathan Franzen's agent , who also wrote a hymn of praise for Mbue: “Imbolo Mbue would be a formidable storyteller anywhere, in any language. It's our good luck that she and her stories are American ”(“ Imbolo Mbue would be an impressive storyteller anywhere and in any language. It is our luck that she and her stories are American ”).

When Behold the Dreamers was published in the fall of 2016, the novel was celebrated as a surprise success in the USA, "the one book Donald Trump should read right now" ("the one book that Donald Trump should read right now"). Cristina Henríquez called the book “a capacious, big-hearted novel” in the New York Times , written “with great confidence and warmth”. According to Ron Charles at the Washington Post , Mbue is “a bright and captivating storyteller” and she achieves “something fresh and insightful” in the novel. The novel received the PEN / Faulkner Award in 2017 . In Die Zeit , Wiebke Porombka commented that the novel fits the time, but is full of clichés and thus typical of "the increasing efforts of publishers not to orient their fiction programs according to literary-aesthetic criteria, but to thematically occupy them in the style of news magazines".

2019 it was included in the anthology New Daughters of Africa by Margaret Busby added.

Mbue lives with her husband and children in Midtown Manhattan , New York, and has been an American citizen since 2014 .

Works

Novels

Essays

Short stories

  • Emke . In: The Threepenny Review , Winter 2015.
  • A reversal . In: Bakwa Magazine , November 13, 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Short biography and reviews of works by Imbolo Mbue at perlentaucher.de
  2. ↑ a b Tara Cheesman: Interview: Imbolo Mbue, Author of Behold the Dreamers . On bookriot.com , July 24, 2017.
  3. ↑ a b Debut Novel Takes On The American Dream ... Racism, Recession And All . In: NPR , August 21, 2016.
  4. ↑ a b c Tariro Mzezewa: Imbolo Mbue on the Importance of Empathy in Life and Literature . In: Vogue , July 19, 2017.
  5. ↑ a b c Annabelle Hirsch: That is how America has always needed immigrants . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 15, 2017.
  6. ↑ Nkiacha Atemnkeng: Imbolo Mbue: Cameroon's literary gem and Africa's first million-dollar novelist . In: Bakwa Magazine , September 12, 2017.
  7. ↑ Cristina Henríquez: An Immigrant Family Encounter the 1 Percent in a Debut Novel . In: The New York Times , September 1, 2016.
  8. ↑ Ron Charles: Behold the Dreamers: The one novel Donald Trump should read now . In: The Washington Post , November 9, 2017.
  9. ↑ Announcing the 2017 PEN / Faulkner Award Winner on the PEN / Faulkner Award page , April 4, 2017.
  10. ↑ Wiebke Porombka: Money spoils the character . In: Die Zeit , March 9, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Mbue, Imbolo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1982
PLACE OF BIRTH Limbe , Cameroon