| Dimitry Elias Léger | |
| Birth Date: | 27 September 1971 |
| Birth Place: | Port-au-Prince, Haiti |
| Language: | English |
| Occupation: | Novelist |
| Genre: | fiction |
| Notableworks: | God Loves Haiti |
Dimitry Elias Léger (born September 27, 1971) is a Haitian-American novelist, journalist, and humanitarian. Léger is best known for the acclaimed novel God Loves Haiti (2015), which the New York Times praised as "a powerful portrait of a nation in peril and the citizens who inhabit it." His writing has appeared in many magazines and newspapers. Since 2010, he has worked as a communications advisor at the United Nations around the world, including in Haiti, Switzerland, and Mali.
Dimitry Elias Léger was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Sept. 27, 1971. His childhood life alternated between New York City and Port-au-Prince until the age of 14, when he permanently moved to Brooklyn.[1] He became a journalist in 1993 and worked as deputy editor of The Source magazine and a staff writer at Fortune magazine, The Miami Herald and MTV News.[1] [2] His writing has also appeared in The New York Times op-ed page, The Washington Post "Book World", The New York Observer and the now defunct The Face magazine in the UK.[3] [4] [5] He became an advisor to the United Nations following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.[6]
Léger's publication of the novel God Loves Haiti with HarperCollins on January 6, 2015, led Time Out New York to declare the book “one of the year’s most powerful debut novels.[7] The New York Observer hailed Léger as an “important new voice.” The newspaper noted the book's “peppery Port-au-Prince slang and untranslated French phrases” in a “melodic and unpredictable debut.”[5] The New Yorker magazine noted “Léger writes with fabulist exuberance and an eye for the absurd.”[6] In the New York Times Book Review, critic Regina Marler offered a similar assessment of the novel's “uneasy tone” that is "satirical-romantic, tragicomic, cynical-sentimental."[8]
Dante scholars praised the connection between God Loves Haiti and the Divine Comedy, the 700-year-old poem by the Italian writer Dante Alighieri. A review in the website Dante Today said, " If you are looking for The Divine Comedy in God Loves Haiti, imagine what Dante’s three-story structure might look like after an earthquake. In Léger’s narrative landscape, Inferno, Purgatario, Paradiso are collapsed onto each other in a heap of dust and rubble. There’s room to regret past choices; there’s no clear route to paradise. Yet in the hellish expanses of destruction Léger manages to uncover shards of redemptive beauty and even a medieval plot twist: his eventual solution to the love triangle is far more Beatrice than Beyoncé."[9]
Léger holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from St. John's University. He studied international development in the mid-career masters in public administration program at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In 2005, he was awarded a global leadership fellowship from the World Economic Forum, the Geneva, Switzerland-based foundation famous for organizing the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of world leaders and CEOs in Davos, Switzerland.