"It all begins with them, the source, the origins, this intimate light that has always guided us, my sisters, Soorya and Salonee, and me. My parents are about twenty and twenty-eight years old in this photo. They were lovers of the arts. This is how Soorya became a dancer, Salonee a painter, and I a writer. Saraswaty and Balgopal Nirsimloo were open doors to the future, imbued with humanism, respect for others, and remarkable modesty. What we owe them is impossible to measure."
Ananda Devi Nirsimloo-Anenden, also known as Ananda Devi, is a francophone Mauritian author. She is the 2024 recipient of the Neustadt Prize, known as the "American Nobel."
"I had just received the Ouest France Étonnants Voyageurs prize. Between that moment and my first book, Solstices, forty years had passed. But writing has been my constant, my life, my reason for being. I cant imagine what I would have been without it. It has made me an observer of the world, of people, of hearts. A sometimes amazed, often terrified witness of the world as we experience it, as we shape it."
"About twenty books, as many translations, decades of work and passion. My whole life is here, there is no need for other images. My face will in no way express everything that is here. From the first published text, La cité Atlee, in a 1973 anthology, and the first collection of short stories, Solstices, published in 1977, to the latest novel, Manger lautre, published by Grasset in 2018. It is a long, slow journey to the heart of words, sentences, dreams, obsessions, violence, and silence."