The Convoy

Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s harrowing, urgent memoir documents and reconstructs her escape, at the age of fifteen, from the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.   “A moving and powerful account of the violence of the genocide in Rwanda and of the aftermath for the survivors. Its descriptions of the terror of the days in hiding are unforgettable” Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature   “This book is a precious thing. A telling of essential truths, an act of generosity and of courage. Out of great tragedy Beata has fashioned a testament of enduring love” Fergal Keane   “A superb act of defiance and an unexpected gift to the world. It reclaims the right to individualise the genocide against the Tutsi and offers a powerful alternative to resilience stories” Olivette Otele, author of African Europeans: An Untold History    ––––––   The author was fifteen at the height of the genocide inflicted on the Tutsi people in Rwanda. She and her mother had spent weeks moving from one insecure shelter to another amid scenes of petrifying violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a period of only three months.   The lives of Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her mother were a sleepless nightmare – until, eventually, a place was eventually found for them on a convoy to safety.    More than a decade later, after rebuilding her life in France, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was ready to begin the process of reconstructing her incomplete memories of the escape and establishing community with other survivors. She is now a poet and a prize-winning novelist, but until now she never written about her own history.    Beginning by making contact with the BBC team which filmed the convoy, then by tracking down aid workers, journalists and fellow escapees and scouring archives in a search for photographs of her crossing of the border, the author pieces together records and personal accounts to try to comprehend the chaos that overtook Rwanda at the time of the genocide.   ––––––––––––   **Winner of the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro, the Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté, the Prix France Télévisions and the Prix du Roman Métis des Lecteurs. Finalist for the Prix du Livre Inter**   “An extraordinarily powerful book, a journey of memory and investigation and discovery; original, humane, and beautifully written” Philippe Sands   “The Convoy is a genocide survivor's determined quest to find out more details about her past. But in Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s gifted hands, this moving and profound book expands to become a meditation on what it means to remember and what we can still salvage from all those things that remain unknown. The Convoy is a deeply intimate story and a generous, capacious examination of survival and healing. It is an affirmation of love’s ability to forge new paths across terrain that hatred and violence once tried to destroy. This is a necessary book for our times” Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize   “The Convoy is a literary detective novel which, as Seamus Heaney would say, allows hope and history to rhyme. Told in clear, concise prose, this is a brave story that comes at a perfect time, and allows us to know that nothing ever truly ends” Colum McCann   “The Convoy is a tour de force, giving equal weight to individual and collective experience with unparalleled clarity, dignity, and lightness of touch. But I believe that it does more, and better, than that. The Convoy represents literature at its finest from the first sentence to the last” Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, winner of the Prix Goncourt   “A non-fiction book which must be recognised as a major work of literature, for here, along with the extreme violence and the story of survival in a time of horrors, is a hitherto unrecorded truth” Nathalie Crom, Télérama   “A gripping story, at once a personal account and a reflection on the indelible traces of genocide” Sophie Rosemont, Vogue France   “Bare-bones, deeply moving and crucial”  Olivier Mony, Livres Hebdo   “A powerful indictment of cowardice in the face of cruelty” Nelly Kaprièlian-Self, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author :
Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was born in Butare in Rwanda in 1979. She was fifteen when she survived the genocide against the Tutsi. She settled in France and has become a writer. Her first novel All Your Children, Scattered and Consolée, her second, were both applauded by critics and booksellers and won prizes. Ruth Diver is an academic who translates from French, German and Russian. Her literary translations include The Competent Authority by Iegor Gran, The Little Girl on the Ice Floe by Adélaïde Bon, Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani and many more. She lives in New Zealand.