Ananda Devi

Ananda Devi was born in 1957 in Trois-Boutiques, Mauritius. Her great-grandparents were from Andhra Pradesh, a state in southern India. She started writing at a very young age, first stories and poems, then teenage novels.
She was noticed when, at the age of 15, she won a literary prize for a short story entitled " The Attlee City " in a competition organized by the ORTF and the ACCT. The short story, broadcast on the radio and published in an anthology, made her known in Mauritius, where she began to write literary texts regularly in newspapers.
She published her first collection of short stories, entitled " Solstices ", in Mauritius at the age of nineteen. She continued her studies in social anthropology at the University of London, where she completed her doctoral thesis on an ethnic minority in Mauritius. At the same time she continued to write and published another collection of short stories in 1987. After finishing her studies, she moved to Congo (Brazzaville) with her husband and published her first novel, " Rue la Poudrière " with Nouvelles Editions Africaines.
Since 1991, she has been a translator in an international organization affiliated with the UN in Geneva. She lives in France near the Swiss border.
Her last seven books have been published by Gallimard. Eve de ses Décombres received the 2006 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, the Prix RFO du livre and the Prix Télévision Suisse Romande du roman.