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Winner of the 2025 Scott Moncrieff Prize. The author was fifteen at the height of the genocide inflicted on the Tutsi people in Rwanda. She and her mother had spent weeks moving from one insecure shelter to another amid scenes of petrifying violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a period of only three months. The lives of Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her mother were a sleepless nightmare - until, eventually, a place was found for them on a convoy to safety. More than a decade later, after rebuilding her life in France, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was ready to begin the process of reconstructing her incomplete memories of the escape and establishing community with other survivors. She is now a poet and a prize-winning novelist, but until now she never written about her own history. Beginning by making contact with the BBC team which filmed the convoy, then by tracking down aid workers, journalists and fellow escapees and scouring archives in a search for photographs of her crossing of the border, the author pieces together records and personal accounts to try to comprehend the chaos that overtook Rwanda at the time of the genocide.
Winner of the 2025 Scott Moncrieff Prize. The author was fifteen at the height of the genocide inflicted on the Tutsi people in Rwanda. She and her mother had spent weeks moving from one insecure shelter to another amid scenes of petrifying violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a period of only three months. The lives of Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her mother were a sleepless nightmare - until, eventually, a place was found for them on a convoy to safety. More than a decade later, after rebuilding her life in France, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was ready to begin the process of reconstructing her incomplete memories of the escape and establishing community with other survivors. She is now a poet and a prize-winning novelist, but until now she never written about her own history. Beginning by making contact with the BBC team which filmed the convoy, then by tracking down aid workers, journalists and fellow escapees and scouring archives in a search for photographs of her crossing of the border, the author pieces together records and personal accounts to try to comprehend the chaos that overtook Rwanda at the time of the genocide.