Antoine Abel

Antoine Abel was born in 1934 in the village of Anse Boileau, into a family of peasants descended from the enslaved Africans brought to the islands generations before. He grew up among fishermen and smallholders, learned masonry, and might have stayed unknown, except that he had a gift and the chance to use it. A scholarship took him to Switzerland for secondary school in 1955, he trained as a teacher, and he later studied at the universities of Reading and Bristol in England.

What made Abel matter is that he put Seychelles on the page. Before him the islands had a rich oral culture, folktales and songs and the sly trickster Soungoula, half-man and half-monkey, but almost no written literature of their own. Abel listened to the elders, the fishermen and farmers whose hard lives he came from, and he wrote their stories down, in poetry, short stories, plays and novels, moving between French, English and Kreol.

In 1977 he became the first Seychellois writer ever published in Europe, when a French house brought out his work, and in 1979 he won France's Prix Mascareignes. For a writer from a tiny Indian Ocean nation this was a door opening. When independence made Kreol a national language, Abel threw himself into it, editing more than sixty titles in Kreol, much of it for children, and writing the first novel and first play in the language.

He died in 2004 and was buried in the village where he was born. Since 2007 the Festival Kreol has awarded the Prix Antoine Abel in his honour, given to new Seychellois writing. For a diaspora that worries its children will lose the stories, Abel is proof that the stories were always worth writing down.

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