Kaya Days: Carl de Souza and Jeffrey Zuckerman in conversation with Kei Miller
Two Lines Press joins Community Bookstore to celebrate Mauritian writer Carl de Souza’s Kaya Days, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman. Carl and Jeffrey will be in conversation with Jamaican poet, essayist, and novelist Kei Miller.
About Kaya Days
“Electric…De Souza’s unpredictable, propulsive tale is a rip-roaring trip teeming with beauty, anger, possibility, and helplessness.” —Publishers Weekly
“A much-anticipated novel in translation from a Mauritian maestro… An electrifying portrait of a tiny island nation on fire.” —Kirkus Reviews
In 1999, the Mauritian seggae musician Joseph Réginald Topize, known as Kaya, was arrested for smoking weed while performing. Following his death in police custody days later, the island nation surged in a long-overdue demand for justice. In Kaya Days, the spirit of Mauritius and its many people—Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, Franco-Mauritian, and Creole—is distilled into a young woman’s daylong search for her younger brother, who has gone missing amid the chaos. Among burning cars and buildings, opportunists and revolutionaries, Santee rises into another world: a furious, brilliant one.
Carl de Souza is a writer born and living in Mauritius. He has published short stories and six novels in France, of which Kaya Days is his first to be translated into English.
Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of French, including the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza, whose Kaya Days has been shortlisted for a PEN Translation Prize. In 2020 he was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, essayist, and novelist, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and winner of the prestigious Forward poetry prize for his collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature and in 2018 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga medal for Arts & Letters. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter and, in 2019, he was the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to. the University of Iowa.