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Patrice Nganang

Camerounian writer who received several awards for his book published in 2001 and originally titled 'Temps de Chien'

In its aim of continuing to bring Africa and Spain closer together through the African continent´s culture and the promotion of its extremely vast literary production, Casa África is expanding  its literature collection by adding a new title to those that have been published up until now. The book was edited thanks to an agreement between the El Aleph - El Cobre editorial and Casa África.  It presents Tiempo de perro (Dog Days) by Patrice Nganang, a Camerounian writer who received several awards for this book published in 2001 and originally titled Temps de Chien.

This book, which as the rest of our collection, may be loaned through the Casa África media library, takes us to Cameroon and its crowded slums such as Madagascar. That´s where the 'El Cliente es Rey' (The Customer Rules) bar, managed by Massa Yo, was located. We will also meet his wife, a fritter vendor, Mother Mado, and her son, Sumi. But especially Mbudjak, the sniffing humanist-dog who observes the thousand and one events that take place in the street, that place where words have their place, where word rules, where rumours spread, where uprisings roar. Dog Time is a novel-hymn for the African towns that await their turn and their voice, an accolade to the word of the street that shapes conscious minds, where French, English, French-English, Cam-English, and Bamileke are intertwined into a flavourful mixed language.

The author is an African literature scholar and is considered to be promising for fictional works. Born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 1970, Patrice Nganang studied Comparative Literature.  He is currently a German and French language professor at the University of Shippenburg (Pennsylvania, USA), while French is the language used in most of his fictional work.

He is the author of numerous novels, such as: La promesse des fleurs (1997), La joie de vivre (2003) and L'invention du beau regard (2004). His most acclaimed novel is the one we are publishing, Temps de Chien (2001), and it earned the Marguerite Yourcenar Award (an award aimed at French-speaking authors residing in the United States) the year it was published, as well as the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Afrique Noire in 2002 (a literature award for leading French-speaking African authors).

Nganang has attempted to describe the poor areas of Yaoundé by creating an extremely original literature in which tragedy and comedy are blended with a colourful domination of French. As a scholar, the author is also a renowned specialist in African literature and a frequent collaborator for various academic magazines throughout the world.