Gaël Faye, the internationally renowned hip-hop artist and Rwandan-French novelist, is set to appear at the 2026 Charleston Literary Festival on Nov. 10 to discuss his novel Jacaranda, a story about memory, family and the long shadow of Rwanda's past. The appearance brings a Prix Renaudot-winning work translated into 28 languages to the historic Dock Street Theatre as part of the festival's run from Nov. 6 through Nov. 15.
According to WCIV, Jacaranda centers on Milan, the twelve-year-old son of a French father and a Rwandan mother, who initially regards the violence and genocide in Rwanda as an abstraction. That distance begins to close when Milan meets his cousin Claude, who journeys to France for medical treatment and then disappears back to Rwanda almost as quickly as he arrived. The two boys do not reconnect until years later, reuniting as teenagers when Milan travels to Rwanda for the first time.
Per the Post and Courier, Faye's Nov. 10 session will address his Prix Renaudot-winning novel and its exploration of memory, family and Rwanda. The newspaper reports the festival runs Nov. 6-15 at the Dock Street Theatre, with individual tickets starting at $30, according to the paper's separate reporting on the festival's symposium and author lineup.
A Story Rooted in Family History
WCIV's reporting notes that Jacaranda is inspired by the author's own family history, a detail that threads through the novel's portrait of a boy forced to reckon with a past he never directly witnessed. The book marks Faye's second novel, following his acclaimed 2016 debut Petit pays, which was published in English as Small Country in 2018, as reported by the Financial Times. The FT also notes that Jacaranda was published in French in 2024 and awarded the Prix Renaudot.
The novel's reach has only grown since. The text has been translated into twenty-eight languages, according to Institut Français, a sign of how far Faye's story about one family's reckoning with Rwanda's history has traveled beyond France.
Themes of Memory, Division and Forgiveness
Critics have framed Jacaranda as more than a coming-of-age tale. The Guardian describes it as a bold family saga exploring a search for healing and truth, one in which the author sees the harm in the divides drawn between victim and perpetrator, Tutsi and Hutu. A separate description from Penguin calls it a powerful account of a country's fragmentation, with the horrific violence neighbors inflicted on neighbors, and the intergenerational trauma that followed.
A Milestone Year for the Festival
Faye's appearance arrives during what organizers are billing as a milestone year for the gathering. The Post and Courier reports the 10th annual Charleston Literary Festival will feature more than 80 authors, plus film, dance, music and theater, while the paper's separate coverage of the festival's symposium and lineup describes more than 45 events over ten days, bringing more than 60 authors to Dock Street Theatre. Live 5 News, meanwhile, reports the 10-day festival will feature 52 events, leaving some discrepancy in the exact scale of this year's program depending on the source consulted.
What is consistent across the coverage is the spotlight on Faye himself, whose dual career as a musician and novelist has made him one of the festival's more closely watched guests. For Charleston audiences, his Nov. 10 conversation offers a rare chance to hear directly from a writer whose fiction draws on his own family's history to examine how memory, violence and the possibility of forgiveness persist across generations.
