Laye, Camara

Abstract Camara Laye (1928–80) was a Francophone writer from French Guinea whose work, spanning colonialism and independence, has become a matter of controversy. As a writer who flirted with different prose styles throughout his career, Laye developed an African form of modernism that challenged prevailing paradigms of colonialism, ethnicity, politics, and existence. However, early in Laye's writing career he faced criticism from other African writers, like Wole Soyinka and Mongo Beti, who saw his work as derivative or not anti‐colonial enough. And later, after he died, accusations of plagiarism were raised, conferring an atmosphere of suspicion and conjecture upon his legacy and work. Laye's works attained a global readership, and their reception in Europe and the United States incorporates some of the complex dynamics that faced African writers publishing in the mid‐twentieth century.