International Booker winner David Diop: ‘It’s war that’s savage, not the soldiers’

The author of At Night All Blood Is Black discusses the unheard African voices of the first world war and the inspiration for his violent antihero

David Diop, the first French novelist and the first writer of African heritage to win the International Booker prize, along with his translator Anna Moschovakis, likes to seek out stories in historical gaps and missing narratives. He was struck by emotion when reading the letters of young French men fighting in the trenches of the first world war - shellshocked teenagers faced with the unmeasurable carnage of trench warfare, a sacrificed generation who often died before their letters reached home.

The novelist, who was born in France but spent his childhood in Dakar, Senegal, after his French mother and Senegalese father met at university in Paris in the 1960s, was floored by the young soldiers' intimacy with war". His novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, is a gripping, twisty account of industrial warfare, colonialism, violence, youth and friendship. It was a massive critical hit and bestseller in France, winning several prizes across Europe. After more than 100 years of first world war literature, in all forms and all languages, critics found something new in Diop's modern take. It was hypnotically compelling", the Booker judges said.