Hemley Boum


Hemley Boum is a Cameroonian novelist. She has received a number of notable awards for her novels, including the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire, the and the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma. Her novels have been translated into Dutch and English.

Life and career

Boum was born in 1973 in Douala, Cameroon. Her mother was a French teacher, and she was the eldest of five children. Growing up, she read European writers at school; she has said "African authors were markedly absent, even in libraries".
Boum studied Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaoundé, graduating with a master's degree. She subsequently studied international trade at the Lille Catholic University and obtained a qualification in marketing and quality from another institution in Lille. In 2009, she moved to Paris with her husband and two children.
Boum has published five novels as of 2024. She started writing her first novel, Le Clan des femmes, online in blog form. It was published as a book in 2010 and tells the story of an African woman in the early 20th century based on Boum's memories of her grandmother. It also dealt with the topic of polygamy. Boum's second novel, Si d'aimer..., received the award in 2013. Her third novel, Les maquisards, is a historical novel about Cameroon's independence struggles. It received the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire and the in 2016.
In 2019, Boum's fourth novel, Les jours viennent et passent, was published. It is about the lives of three generations of Cameroonian women and the impacts of extremism in Cameroon. It won the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma in 2020. An English translation, Days Come and Go, was published by Bakwa Books in the United States in 2022. Her fifth novel, Le Rêve du pêcheur, was published in 2024 and deals with themes of mental healh and intergenerational trauma. The same year, the Sciences Po Alumni association awarded its first literary prize to Hemley Boum thanks to this novel.
In 2025, the Association of French-Language Writers awarded its Grand prix Afrique to Hemley Boum for her novel Le Rêve du pêcheur.

Works

Le Clan des femmes, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010 Si d'aimer…, Ciboure: La Cheminante, 2012 Les maquisards, Ciboure: La Cheminante, 2015 Les jours viennent et passent, Paris: Gallimard, 2019,