Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Kettly Mars
2023-2024
Discipline(s)
Literature
Theme(s)
Inequalities, inclusion & Social Innovation; Other
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Kettly Mars is an award-winning novelist, poet, and short-story writer from Haiti. She writes in French and Creole. Her novels address such themes as gender relations and class issues in connection to the violence that power exerts, spiritual inheritance, and decolonization that are at the core of her country’s present and future. Kettly’s work has been translated in English, German, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, Croatian, Danish, and Arabic.
Kettly is a self employed creative writing instructor and has more than twenty years of experience teaching at secondary and university level in her home country. Since moving to Florida (US) in 2021, Kettly teaches creative writing at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Florida Atlantic University to students aged from sixty-five to eighty years old.
Research Project
Fiction and Auto-Fiction Writing The Art of Dissimulation
During her fellowship, Kettly deepened and shareed her experience as a writer of auto-fiction. Her first auto-fiction novel translated in English is entitled I am alive (2022). At the Collegium, she is working on a second one which recounts her experience of living for the first time in a foreign country. In this process, Kettly examines the central problems of South-North migration and the complicated human situations that can arise from the search for a better life.
Research Interests:
auto-fiction; literature; migration