- I have a need to write about things that happened under silence. Burundi does not exist in the collective consciousness. My book is the first one I've read that is about someone who comes from Bujumbura and who is mixed.

Gael Faye grew up in the Burundi capital of Bujumbura with a Rwandan mother and a French father. In 1995, the year after the Rwanda genocide and the escalating contradictions in Burundi - also due to the ethnic conflict between Hutu and Tutsi - the family fled the carnage and settled in one of Paris's suburbs.

- For me, genocide is not something you can tell right about this. One must find a way of approaching for it to be acceptable. That is also why I like poetry. You can say things in a way that makes the reader actually hear. When it's too explicit, too violent, then people stop listening.

Millions of dead - numbers you can't relate to

Faye's debut book, which has come in the middle of an ongoing and successful artist career, has been hailed by critics and published in 35 countries around the world.

The ten-year-old main character Gabriel shares the author's background and lives a relatively protected life in the shadow of the escalating conflict. He struggles hard to continue being a child and not have to take a stand. Until his mother one day comes home, in psychosis, after looking for his murdered family in Rwanda.

- I want the readers to be Gabriel. The power of literature is to get people into other people's worlds - that's how you are touched. A story about millions of dead, those numbers are unreliable. But when you go into an individual you suddenly understand. I want people to understand that a childhood in an exotic African country far away is the same as anywhere.