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Dimitry Elias Léger

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Dimitry Elias Léger
Dimitry Elias Léger in a New York City bookstore
Dimitry Elias Léger in a New York City bookstore
Born (1971-09-27) September 27, 1971 (age 53)
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
OccupationNovelist
LanguageEnglish
Genrefiction
Notable worksGod Loves Haiti
Website
dimitryleger.tumblr.com

Dimitry Elias Léger (born September 27, 1971) is a Haitian-American novelist, journalist, and humanitarian. Léger is best known for the acclaimed novel God Loves Haiti (2015), which the New York Times praised as "a powerful portrait of a nation in peril and the citizens who inhabit it." His writing has appeared in many magazines and newspapers. Since 2010, he has worked as a communications advisor at the United Nations around the world, including in Haiti, Switzerland, and Mali.

Biography

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Dimitry Elias Léger was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Sept. 27, 1971. His childhood life alternated between New York City and Port-au-Prince until the age of 14, when he permanently moved to Brooklyn.[1] He became a journalist in 1993 and worked as deputy editor of The Source magazine and a staff writer at Fortune magazine, The Miami Herald and MTV News.[1][2] His writing has also appeared in The New York Times op-ed page, The Washington Post "Book World", The New York Observer and the now defunct The Face magazine in the UK.[3][4][5] He became an advisor to the United Nations following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.[6]

Reception

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Léger's publication of the novel God Loves Haiti with HarperCollins on January 6, 2015, led Time Out New York to declare the book “one of the year’s most powerful debut novels.[7] The New York Observer hailed Léger as an “important new voice.” The newspaper noted the book's “peppery Port-au-Prince slang and untranslated French phrases” in a “melodic and unpredictable debut.”[5] The New Yorker magazine noted “Léger writes with fabulist exuberance and an eye for the absurd.”[6] In the New York Times Book Review, critic Regina Marler offered a similar assessment of the novel's “uneasy tone” that is "satirical-romantic, tragicomic, cynical-sentimental."[8]

Dante scholars praised the connection between God Loves Haiti and the Divine Comedy, the 700-year-old poem by the Italian writer Dante Alighieri. A review in the website Dante Today said, " If you are looking for The Divine Comedy in God Loves Haiti, imagine what Dante’s three-story structure might look like after an earthquake. In Léger’s narrative landscape, Inferno, Purgatario, Paradiso are collapsed onto each other in a heap of dust and rubble. There’s room to regret past choices; there’s no clear route to paradise. Yet in the hellish expanses of destruction Léger manages to uncover shards of redemptive beauty and even a medieval plot twist: his eventual solution to the love triangle is far more Beatrice than Beyoncé."[9]

Awards and honors

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Education

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Léger holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from St. John's University. He studied international development in the mid-career masters in public administration program at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In 2005, he was awarded a global leadership fellowship from the World Economic Forum, the Geneva, Switzerland-based foundation famous for organizing the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of world leaders and CEOs in Davos, Switzerland.

References

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  1. ^ a b "New novel explores life between Brooklyn and Haiti". The Brooklyn Paper. January 20, 2015. Retrieved June 28, 2015.
  2. ^ "about". Retrieved July 1, 2015.[permanent dead link]
  3. ^ "Home Is Where The Epicenter Is". The New York Times. April 11, 2010. Retrieved June 28, 2015.
  4. ^ "Upcoming In Book World". The Washington Post. October 25, 2002. Archived from the original on December 17, 2017. Retrieved June 28, 2015.
  5. ^ a b "When The Source Magazine Was The Source Of All Cool". The New York Observer. September 19, 2014. Retrieved June 28, 2015.
  6. ^ a b "Briefly Noted – God Loves Haiti". The New Yorker. April 20, 2015. Retrieved June 29, 2015.
  7. ^ "Dimitry Elias Léger: God Loves Haiti". Time Out. January 15, 2015.
  8. ^ "Debut Novels, New Books by Emma Hopper, Quan Barry and Dimitry Elias Léger". The New York Times. February 6, 2015. Retrieved July 2, 2015.
  9. ^ "Dimitry Léger, God Loves Haiti (2015)". Retrieved August 10, 2015.
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