Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse (b 1979, Rwanda) is a French-Rwandan author who came to France at the age of 15 after fleeing the 1994 Tutsi genocide in her homeland, when almost a million people were killed. After studying literature, politics, international collaboration and development, she was employed for a long time on humanitarian work with international organisations

Mairesse began writing from a desire to communicate her experience of the brutal events in Rwanda. Her literary debut was the prize-winning short-story collection Ejo (2015). Ejo means both yesterday and tomorrow, and life before and after 1994 is a recurrent theme in her work.

She published the short-story collection Lézardes in 2017 and the poetry collection Après le progrès in 2019. Her latest work is the novel Tous les enfants dispersés, which appeared in 2021.