IEA

My research project concerns one of my Haitians ancestors, Sylla Laraque, the uncle of my grandmother Luce Laraque, a coffee exporter who made his fortune in New York by investing heavily in the construction of the Panama Canal. In the late nineteenth century Sylla Laraque moved to France where he acquired several impressive homes, one in Neuilly, one in Paris, and the castle of Monchy-Humières near Compiègne. Later, he founded a resort in a fishing village in Brittany, Saint-Lunaire close to Dinard, where he built several luxury hotels, the Hotel de Paris and the Grand Hotel de la plage (with casino), and financed the first flight of the aviator Bleriot over the Channel from Calais to Dover. The tumultuous life of this entrepreneur, businessman and intrepid adventurer does not interest me only because he belonged to my family, but from a more general aspect, historical and economical. I intend to write a postcolonial novel on this eccentric character who was a forerunner of what is called globalization today.

The German writer, literary critic, and journalist HANS CHRISTOPH BUCH was born in Wetzlar in 1944. His grandfather was a pharmacist und botanist who settled down in Haiti, which is why Buch developed a special interest in the Caribbean. He lived and worked in East and West Africa, South America, Cuba, and Haiti and has taught as Writer in Residence and visiting professor at prestigious universities in Germany, the United States, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires and La Habana. Hans Christoph Buch is a member of the International PEN.

He edited the collected essays of Lu Xun, and he visited the People’s Republic of China in 1985 and again in 2009.

Hans Christoph Buch first drew attention to himself in 1966 with a collection of short-stories entitled "Unerhörte Begebenheiten". The next step in his literary career was marked by his political satires from the years 1971-1975, which, under the title "Aus der Neuen Welt", told stories and news from an imaginary America. His first novel "Die Hochzeit von Port-au-Prince" was published in 1984 and translated into many languages. In that same year, Buch was named "Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" by the French minister of culture. In 2005, he received the literary award of the Frankfurt anthology, in 2011 the prestigious Schubart prize.

In the mid-nineties, Hans Christoph Buch traveled to Rwanda and Burundi to report on the conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis. In the following years he visited various war zones including Algeria, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, Congo, Cuba, Haiti, East Timor, Kosovo, Liberia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. Buch is a free lance reporter who works as a foreign correspondent and regular contributor to the literary pages of big German newspapers like "Die Zeit", "Die Welt" and "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung".

Hans Christoph Buch has published several books of travel writing and reportages such as „Tropische Früchte - Afro-amerikanische Impressionen", „Die neue Weltunordnung - Bosnien, Burundi, Haiti, Kuba, Liberia, Ruanda, Tschetschenien", and „Blut im Schuh - Schlächter und Voyeure an den Fronten des Weltbürgerkriegs". His novel „Kain und Abel in Afrika" thematizes the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. More recently, H. C. Buch published a volume of short stories "Wie Karl May Adolf Hitler traf und andere wahre Geschichten" and two collections of essays: "Black Box Afrika" and "Das rollende R der Revolution", reports from Latin America. His novels "Sansibar Blues" and "Apokalypse Afrika", as well as "Tod in Habana" and "Reise um die Welt in 80 Nächten" have won a lot of critical acclaim and media attention in the German speaking world.

Hans Christoph Buch lives in Berlin. He speaks English, French, and Spanish and he reads Russian, Latin, and Greek.