Afrilivres is a pan-African association founded in 2002. Its headquarters are based in Cotonou, Benin. It currently brings together 54 publishing houses from 14 French-speaking countries south of the Sahara, Madagascar and Mauritius.

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Cérès is one of the most important book publishing houses in North Africa. Publishing mainly in French and Arabic, its books are distributed in Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Mali, Benin, Lebanon, France, and many other countries. Cérès publishes approximately 45 new titles each year and has a current catalogue of over 700 titles in a wide variety of fields including fiction, history, philosophy, literature, education, social science, and tourist guides. Cérès publications have become benchmark works, addressing topics as diverse as Carthage, Tunisian mosaics, and painters.

Cérès est la déesse de la fertilité (romaine, anté-islamique).

Éditions Tarik, based in Casablanca, Morocco, is headed by Bichr Bennani and Marie-Louise Belarbi, both founder members of Apell (Association for the promotion of book publishing and reading). Since its inception in 1999, this independent publishing firm has been involved in the debates of the modern world. Its objective is to explore the themes of history and current events, of society and memory, without neglecting the literary production of young Moroccan authors, and by giving priority, whenever possible, to co-publishing.

Nous étions 10 au départ de la maison (il y a 17 ans !)… après de longues heures de discussions, ce choix s’est porté sur Tarik, parce que chacun pouvait lui donner le sens qu’il voulait : Tarik Ibn Zyad (grand stratège du VIIe siècle, de plus d’origine berbère) ; Jabal Tarik (le mont Tarik, comme Gibraltar) ; la voie, le chemin, la route… ; Tarik est aussi un prénom qui était porté par des enfants ou petits-enfants de membre du groupe… Bref chacun y lisait ce qu’il voulait !

Zellige: enamel-coated chips of terra cotta set into plaster, used to decorate monuments and home interiors in the Arab world.

With a firmly international focus, and a deliberately diversified catalogue (novels, essays and albums), Zellige aims to develop close partnerships with publishers, bookstore managers and distributors in the French-speaking world. So the works can be published simultaneously in all the countries involved. And at prices tailored to local buying power.
Steering clear of the centralising mindset, programmes are not systematically initiated in France. Out of the thirty titles featuring in this catalogue, half have originated from one of Zellige’s partners, in Algeria, Haiti, Morocco, Tunisia, Belgium or Lebanon.
Furthermore, Zellige has expanded into graphic design and communications, with customers sometimes hailing from other walks of life than publishing.

As for the publishing house’s name, recalling mosaics, it expresses its sharing, partnership-focussed, open attitude.

Yomad was founded end 1998. It is a small publishing house specialising in books for young people. Its means are tiny but its ambition is huge, stemming from the dearth of local creation witnessed in literature for young people. It is true that the children’s departments in bookstores are crammed with books from elsewhere, books filled with references which are completely foreign to the culture and environment of Moroccan children. Whereas children need to set down roots in order to forge their identity and live in harmony with society. This is what underpins Yomad.
An initial collection, “mini Yemma”, of three books by Driss Chraïbi and a second collection, entitled “Yemma”, comprising two books by Habib Mazini were published in March 1999. With Driss Chraïbi as the star author in the catalogue, Yomad was able to get noticed quickly. Next came Zaïna et le fils du vent which proved highly popular among young readers. It received the high-school children’s Grand Atlas 2001 award. Further to requests from young readers, a second volume was published: Le défi de Zaïna.

The Yomad catalogue now features 10 collections comprising 40 books. The collections “Hikayat”, “Mini-Yemma”, “Mini-Yemma novels”, “Yemma”, “Contes du Maroc” (Moroccan folk tales), “Rêves d’enfants” (Children’s dreams), “Yemma junior”, “Raconte-moi l’Histoire” (Tell me a story), “Mini-plume” and “Nostalgie”.

Heavyweights in Moroccan and Algerian literature have contributed several of their own writings, including Driss Chraïbi, Fouad Laroui, Abdellatif Laâbi, Abdelhak Serhane, Zakya Daoud, Mohamed Dib and other less well-known authors such as Jocelyne Laâbi, Habib Mazini, Mehdi Degraincourt, Ouadia Bennis, Charlotte Bousquet, Véronique Abt, Dominique Logié, Françoise Chémaô, Christian Devèze, Zidrou, Samia Benatya, Keltoum Mosdik, Majid Al Amiri and Florence Deville-Patte. The illustrators who have provided pretty decorations for the texts are Nathalie Logié, Alexis Logié, Virginie Soumagnac, Abdellatif Mitari, Moshine Drissi, Saïd Boucetta, Karim Yahia, Noureddine Lahrech, Tasneem Allouch, Carole Gourat, Saïd Oumouloud, Jean-Paul Favreau, Pierre Léger and Orélie Gouel.

Je suis partie de « nomade » car pour moi, l’éditeur, l’écrivain, le lecteur, le livre sont tous des nomades. Le nom n’a pas été accepté, car il existait déjà. J’ai juste retiré le N et je l’ai remplacé par Y. Je trouve que Yomad a une belle sonorité.

Vents d’ailleurs was founded in 1999 by Gilles Colleu and Jutta Hepke. Publishing professionals for about 25 years, our starting point was when we noticed a great emptiness, a great shortage in the publishing industry. Book supply is substantial in France, yet many cultures are missing or under-represented. We are convinced that the knowledge of cultures from abroad, the others’ cultures, helps build a society with more solidarity and enriches any human being in his quest for humanity. It is therefore important to build bridges and to make available to everybody the tools to become or to be a citizen of today’s world. Written works, literature, arts, books contribute to this.
We want to contribute to building tomorrow’s world, to opening doors and windows wide to other visions of the world. We have thus opened our door to authors and illustrators, to visions and ideas from abroad, so as to continue together, on the long term, the journey of creation and literature.

Our editorial policy focuses on books telling stories from the “inside”, texts, narratives which do not contemplate other cultures or faraway fantasies – but which, on the contrary, come to us from elsewhere. These stories make us dream and wonder, they question us. The approach is reversed; shifting the point of view changes everything. Our representations, here in France, in a rich Northern country, are questioned, and our landmarks shifted away. Imaginations, languages, ideas, images, cultural expressions clash, cross, permeate each other.

Vents d’ailleurs is a member of the Alliance of independent publishers, the association Éditeurs sans frontières and the association Jedi Paca. Vents d’ailleurs is distributed in Haiti by Communication Plus and in Canada by Dimédia.

A limited liability company founded in 1996 in Libreville to design, publish, and distribute intellectual works, Éditions du Silence started out publishing scientific journals for the University of Libreville before branching out into the publication of essays, accounts, memoirs, and writings about traditional culture. In 2007, it opened up to fiction and confirmed its grounding in the milieu of schools and universities and, more generally, in the world of ideas to better share our home: Earth.

Sankofa & Gurli is a Burkinabe publishing house created in 1995. With its creation, several objectives were fixed to promote literature while acting in various and complementary plans which include writing (support of and follow-up with authors), reading (communication with the public), and output and diffusion; to promote and revalorize the African languages, especially those spoken in Burkina Faso and transnational languages, across an editorial policy which avoids marginalizing publication in African languages (aesthetic of the form and the contents, topics, circulation of the publications...); to produce literature of quality at costs corresponding to the local purchasing power; to work to arouse in the children and the young people the taste for reading and writing, and anchor in them, as soon as possible, practices of output and consumption of the writing; in a general way, to contribute to the promotion, the development, and the reinforcement of culture, especially literary, in a context of generalized illiteracy. Since 1999, the contacts have been diversified, the commitments reinforced and widened: Sankofa & Gurli Editions participate with various partners (African, European, North American) in co-publishing projects;
Member of the Alliance of independent publishers, Sankofa & Gurli contributes to the debate and to the fight for bibliodiversity and solidarity in publishers’ independence across the world.

Le nom de la maison d’édition est double. SANKOFA est le nom de l’oiseau qui, dans la cosmogonie des peuples AKAN, symbolise la conscience historique. Son slogan est « Il n’y a pas de honte à revenir sur ses pas pour prendre ce qu’on a perdu/oublié en cours de chemin ». GURLI est le nom du hérisson en gulmancema. Il symbolise aux yeux du fondateur de la maison d’édition l’ingénuité enfantine et le caractère absolu de la liberté des idées. On racontait souvent aux enfants qu’il était impossible de garder prisonnier un hérisson. Toutes les tentatives par ces enfants d’en enfermer un se révélaient vaines, le hérisson disparaissait toujours de sa prison. Bien des années plus tard, l’enfant que j’étais (suis ?) a appris que c’étaient nos aînés qui libéraient le petit animal. Ainsi en est-il des idées : on a beau les enfermer, les emprisonner, il se trouvera toujours un moyen, une personne, une circonstance, qui les libérera...

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Read here the article from Jeune Afrique, May 7, 2021.

Mémoire d’encrier was founded in March 2003 in Montréal by the writer Rodney SAINT-ÉLOI. It publishes works of fiction: novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, essays and accounts. Mémoire d‘encrier offers a varied catalogue that builds bridges between cultures and imagination in the North and South. The basic idea underlying our work is that of dialogue between cultures in a perspective of solidarity and of accepting the Other. Mémoire d’encrier is geared around a body of over a hundred works by authors from Canada, Quebec, the Caribbean, Native America, Africa, and Europe. The goal being to refuse exclusion and to redefine collective living.

Mémoire d’encrier : enraciner l’encre (l’écrit) dans le patrimoine oral. Associer la mémoire à l’écrit ; associer en ce sens littérature (écrits) et oraliture (traditions orales) ; assumer la continuité entre mémoire et modernité.

Globalisation, new information and communication technologies and individualisation are all radically overturning how people live and work, what they think and believe. L’Atelier hopes to help humanise this transformation, by encouraging the re-establishment of social ties and by making it possible for people from humble backgrounds to take a proactive stance in their own lives, through the publication of books in three fields: Christianity; culture and religion; social and human sciences.
True to the tradition of Editions Ouvrières, a publishing firm set up by the Young Christian Workers movement in 1929, L’Atelier aims to promote works that bridge different spheres of knowledge, that which is forged by experience as well as that which results from analytical work, for books to act as an agent of emancipation and enrichment of social ties for as many people as possible.