At the Pontas Agency we're glad to announce that, following the international success of his debut novel Tram 83 (originally written in French and published by Éditions Métailié in 2014 and later translated into fifteen languages), Fiston Mwanza Mujila is back with his highly anticipated second novel. La danse du vilain (The Villain’s Dance) will be published by Éditions Métailié in September 2020 (if the situation allows it!) and translation rights have already been sold into English: North America (Deep Vellum), German (Zsolnay und Deuticke / Hanser), Swedish (Rámus Förlaget), Danish (Jensen & Dalgaard) and Arabic (Al Kotobkhan).
The publisher Anne-Marie Métailié says:
“What a beautiful surprise this book is in the fog of the Coronavirus. All the vitality and charm of Tram 83 comes back in force with the inimitable language of Fiston Mwanza Mujila”.
And editor Lise Belperron adds:
“The Villain's Dance is a staggering plunge in late Mobutu’s Congo among gold diggers, street children, false prophets and the great Madonna of the mines of Cafunfu, but also an ode to poetic punch, rumba music, and outside life (!), where the most squalid is always saved by literature. It’s a wonderful chaos you don’t ever want to leave!"
While Will Evans from Deep Vellum Publishing declares:
“This inventive, intense, unique novel gets to the heart of the human condition, while still reflecting the world’s darkness and strangeness in a storytelling voice that is uniquely Fiston’s own. The novel is visionary, and absolutely vital in today’s political and social climate.”
Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1981) writes poetry, prose, and theatre. He now lives in Graz (Austria), where he teaches African literature at Universität Graz and works with musicians in Austria on various projects. His first novel Tram 83 was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and the Prix du Monde (among others), and was awarded the Etisalat Prize for Literature and the Internationaler Literaturpreis from Der Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
For more information, please contact Anna Soler-Pont.