Shumona Sinha

A young woman hits a migrant over the head with a wine bottle in the metro and finds herself in police custody. There she is asked to explain herself: What drives a dark-skinned woman of Indian descent, who mediates between asylum seekers and officials as an interpreter, to commit such an act?

In Assommons Les Pauvres! (Slay the poor!), Shumona Sinha drastically depicts the intolerability of the European asylum system. For the author, the book had serious consequences: she lost her job as an interpreter at the Paris asylum office. In her novel, she records the progressive callousness of the authority's employees and notes the tall tales that migrants tell them on a daily basis. The current situation gives this book an immense explosive power: "the most disturbing novel of the year" (Der Spiegel).

Shumona Sinha was born in Calcutta in 1973 and has lived in Paris since 2001. She has received numerous awards for her novel Assommons Les Pauvres!