About the Author:
Kossi Komla-Ebri, a medical surgeon living and practicing in Italy, was born in Togo in 1954. As a naturalized Italian citizen, he works actively in local politics to promote the status of migrant workers. He came to Italy in 1974, where he earned medical degrees at the Universities of Bologna and Milan. He has won several literary prizes for creative prose. He is co-author of the book Afrique, la Santé par Images [Africa, Its Medical System through Pictures]. He has recently published Imbarazzismi--quotidiani imbrazziin bianco e nero [Embaracisms--daily embarrassments in black and white] (2002), a collection of anecdotes illustrating latent and unintentional racism in Italy, and the novel Neyla (2002), both of which have achieved popular critical success.

About the Translator:
Peter N. Pedroni, a native of New Haven, Connecticut, is a professor of Italian at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and director of the Miami University Summer Language Institute in Italy. He has studied at the University of Florence and has academic degrees from Yale University, Middlebury College, and Rutgers University. He has published several articles on, interviews with, and translations of Italian writers of the twentieth century. He is the author of Existence as Theme in Carlo Cassola's Fiction (1985) and The Anti-Naturalist Experience: Federigo Tozzi (1989); and is the translator of Paolo Volponi's novel Il sipario ducale as Last Act in Urbino 1995.

Neyla is a treasure of African experiences recorded through the eyes of an African who is at once a participant and an observer, the latter due to the fact that he has come home on vacation from Europe. The natural story line exposes the reader to a variety of settings in the author's native Togo: middle-class city life, urban slums, an adventurous trip to the hinterland, and life in a village, including the work of a witch doctor. The protagonist's particular status also legitimizes comparisons between African and European cities, medical practices, family relations, reciprocal stereotyping, and prejudices. On another level, Kossi Komla-Ebri expresses lyrically his protagonist's situation as the eternal migrant, living between two cultures. Through the use of various narrative strategies, Komla-Ebri has achieved a lyricism of universal quality that represents the best of migration literature in Italy.