Alain Mabanckou was born in Congo in 1966. An award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, Mabanckou currently lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at UCLA. He is the author of African Psycho, Broken Glass, Black Bazaar, Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty, The Lights of Pointe-Noire and Black Moses. In 2015, Mabanckou was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.

Originally published in France as Les cigognes sont immortelles by âEditions du Seuil, Paris, in 2018.