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Represented By: Sharmaine Lovegrove
Born and raised in Paris to a family whose roots span India, Vietnam and the Republic of the Congo, she is interested in how history lives on in families, relationships and communities, and in the ways people negotiate belonging and home across generations.
She studied Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin before completing a degree in Sociocultural Studies at Europa-Universität Viadrina. She later became a Visiting Scholar in African Diaspora Studies and Black Geographies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores Black popular culture, dancehall, postcolonial identity and transnational cultural exchange, and has resulted in two academic books, Welches Geschlecht hat Dancehall? and Resistdance.
Alongside her literary practice, Cyrielle works in creative project management, leading international creative productions and campaigns for global fashion brands. She has spent more than a decade developing cultural programmes that bring together literature, dance, music and critical dialogue. As former Chair of MINCE e.V., she helped shape the CDC Festival in Berlin, one of Europe's leading Afro-Caribbean dance festivals, where she curated the conference programme and community sessions, creating spaces for exchange between artists, scholars and communities.
Cyrielle is an alumna of the Black Women Writers in Europe residency. She has participated in the Kweli International Literary Festival and developed her fiction through the Stuyvesant Writing Workshop under the mentorship of novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn.
At the heart of her writing is a fascination with how people inherit, resist and reinvent the worlds they come from.
Represented By: Sharmaine Lovegrove
Born and raised in Paris to a family whose roots span India, Vietnam and the Republic of the Congo, she is interested in how history lives on in families, relationships and communities, and in the ways people negotiate belonging and home across generations.
She studied Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin before completing a degree in Sociocultural Studies at Europa-Universität Viadrina. She later became a Visiting Scholar in African Diaspora Studies and Black Geographies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores Black popular culture, dancehall, postcolonial identity and transnational cultural exchange, and has resulted in two academic books, Welches Geschlecht hat Dancehall? and Resistdance.
Alongside her literary practice, Cyrielle works in creative project management, leading international creative productions and campaigns for global fashion brands. She has spent more than a decade developing cultural programmes that bring together literature, dance, music and critical dialogue. As former Chair of MINCE e.V., she helped shape the CDC Festival in Berlin, one of Europe's leading Afro-Caribbean dance festivals, where she curated the conference programme and community sessions, creating spaces for exchange between artists, scholars and communities.
Cyrielle is an alumna of the Black Women Writers in Europe residency. She has participated in the Kweli International Literary Festival and developed her fiction through the Stuyvesant Writing Workshop under the mentorship of novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn.
At the heart of her writing is a fascination with how people inherit, resist and reinvent the worlds they come from.
Author: Cyrielle Tamby
Genres: Literary Fiction
A woman runs from her sister for four countries. A pregnancy sends her home.
Carol, Désirée and Sabrina are three sisters carrying the same inheritance in three different directions. Where Carol has stayed and hardened, and Sabrina has found a fragile kind of peace, Désirée has spent her adult life in motion, from Berlin to Brooklyn to Jamaica to the South of France, running from a family silence she has never named and can't outrun.
The novel follows Désirée as an unexpected pregnancy forces her back toward Carol, and toward a spiritual inheritance she has always felt in her body before she has understood it in her mind, rooted in dance, touch and ancestral memory rather than in anything abstract. At the centre of it is Viola, a presence whose full meaning is only gradually revealed, and whose pull on Désirée forces a reckoning that fire alone cannot resolve.
DÉSIRÉE is a novel about sisterhood as inheritance, about the body as the place where diaspora and memory are actually kept, and about what it costs to finally stop moving.
For readers of: Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half, Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory.