Marguerite Abouet

Writer Marguerite Abouet was born in the Yopougon area of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. At age 12, she moved to Paris, where she completed her education. Abouet worked as a legal assistant while beginning her career as a novelist and writer of graphic novels. The first book in her acclaimed graphic novel series Aya, Aya de Yopougon, was published in 2005. Illustrated by Clément Oubrerie, the series follows the life of a teenage girl in Abidjan in the late 1970s. Abouet has said in interviews that she hopes to portray a more realistic vision of Africa through the Ayabooks: “As an African person living in France, I don’t want to see how badly the media represents the Ivory Coast,” Abouet told John Zuarino. “The African people have enough of these very bad, miserable images of Africa that the media will show.”
 
Abouet’s Ayabooks have sold more than 350,000 copies and been translated into 15 languages. Other works by Abouet include the children’s book Akissi: Attaque de Chats (2010). She currently lives in a suburb outside Paris where she writes full time and runs Des livres pour tous (Books for All), an organization that supports literacy education of disadvantaged children in Africa through building and maintaining libraries.