Malagasy writer, playwright and Publisher.

Jean-Luc RAHARIMANANA (Jean-Luc Raharimanana) was born in 1967, in Antananarivo, Madagascar. He is a Malagasy writer in French.
He obtained a first university diploma in literature in 1989 and started working in the theatre with Christiane Ramanantsoa to help direct "Le Prophète et le Président". However, the Alliance française decided to cancel the play in the end because of political pressure by the minister of culture and the Malagasy government. The official reason was that they wanted to avoid a diplomatic incident.
Two months later, Raharimanana obtained the award for best short story from Radio France Internationale (RFI) and accepted the scholarship which allowed him to come to France.
The play "Le Prophète et le Président" was eventually put on in Limoges and Avignon. It was directed by Vincent Mambatchaka. It went on a tour of Africa, France, Canada and Belgium.
In Paris, the writer started studying first at the Sorbonne then at INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) where he obtained an advanced degree in literature and civilisation with Malagasy tales as his subject of research.
He was a freelance journalist at RFI and worked on a project for the theatre. He contributed to the development of a school of the theatre arts in Madagascar. He also had a project that took him on a three-year world tour.
He then started teaching French and cooperated in many literary, pedagogic and journalistic events in the USA, France, Italy, Rwanda and Madagascar. All of these activities testify to the writer's commitment.
In 2002, Jean-Luc Raharimanana stopped teaching in order to defend his father, a history professor at the university of Antananarivo who had been arrested and tortured by the Malagasy authorities following a radio show on the history of Madagascar. Afterwards, Raharimanana felt all the more the necessity of focusing all his attention on his writing, on research and the restoration of the memories of his people that had been corrupted by tales where myth and fiction intermingle. So far, he has published some short stories, Lucarne, "Rêves sous le linceul", a play, "Le Puits", and a novel, "Nour". "Madagascar 1947" is being published the year that marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Malagasy insurrection.

In 2021, he launched the Éditions Project'îles, which he co-directs along with Nassuf Djailani.

Source:
www.etonnants-voyageurs.com/spip.php?article1684.