Kettly Mars

Kettly Mars  was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, into a black middle-class family. She is a self-taught intellectual and cultural activist. She has had a career as a writer since the early 1990s, writing novels, poems and short stories and is one of the major voices in Haitian literature. Through her writings she puts fiction at the heart of life and campaigns to bring about political and social changes in Haiti. She grew up during the savage dictatorship which reigned in Haiti from 1957 to 1986 and, later, she wrote her seminal novel “Savage Seasons” (translated into 6 languages) which is an account of the scars dictatorship leave on society. Kettly Mars is today the author of a considerable body of work. She has published two collections of poems, four collections of short stories, twelve novels, some of which have been translated into several languages. Her works have been awarded several literary prizes, among them: Le Prix Jacques Stephen Alexis de la Nouvelle (Haiti), le Prix Senghor (France), the Prince Claus Award for Culture (The Netherlands) and The Prix Ivoire for Francophone Literature (Ivory Coast).