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Nicki Hitchcott. Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP, 2015. 229 pp.
Nicki Hitchcott's Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994 is the first work to address the absence of scholarship concerning fictional texts by Rwandan authors. Hitchcott builds on and engages with scholarly monographs such as Catherine Coquio's Rwanda: Le reel et les recits (2004) and Alexandre Dauge-Roth's Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda (2010) both of which gave extensive analyses of first-person Rwandan survivor testimony as well as the literary works of non-Rwandans writing about the genocide. Hitchcott's study is unique in giving unprecedented visibility to Rwandan authors of literary fiction, placing their works alongside now canonical texts on the 1994 genocide such as Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop's novel Murambi (2000), Djiboutian Abdourahman Waberi's collection of short essays Moisson de cranes (2000), and Guinean Tierno Monenembo's novel L'aínes des orphelins (2000).
French-based Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga, the winner of the 2012 Renaudot literary prize for her novel Notre-Dame du Nil, features prominently in Hitchcott's study but she also devotes significant space to lesser-known authors whose works are some of the most complex and unflinching attempts to use fiction to understand the slaughter of one mil- lion of Rwanda's Tutsi and moderate Hutu population in 1994. Aside from Mukasonga, only three other Rwandan authors have been translated into English. Francophone Rwandan writers such as Venuste Kayimahe (La chanson de ľaube, 2014), Anicet Karege (Sous le deluge rwandais, 2005), Camille Karangwa (Le Chapelet et la machette: sur les traces du genocide rwandais, 2003), Robusto Kana (Le Défi de Survivre, 2009) and Jean-Marie V. Rurangwa (Au sortir...