Congratulations to Associate Professor of French Benjamin Hoffmann, on the publication of his newest novel L'île de la Sentinelle.

Hoffmann shared his inspiration for this project:

"Located six hundred miles off the coast of India, North Sentinel Island is home to the last people completely cut off from the modern world, the Sentinelese. No one knows where they come from, what language they speak, what their beliefs are. The only certainty about them: for centuries they have repelled foreigners who visit their home, Venetian travelers, British settlers, Chinese sailors, Malaysian poachers, European monarchs or missionaries from the United States.

My novel tells the story of these people and that of Krish and Markus, two friends who have nothing in common except their fascination for the forbidden island. One is an anthropologist, married to an American and of Indian origin; the other is a New York publisher and the heir to a huge fortune built up in the art business. Many of us have heard about North Sentinel Island after the death of American missionary John Allen Chau, who was killed by the Sentinelese in 2018 when he tried to preach the gospel to them. You will read that the Sentinelese are “savages”, “cannibals”, “stone-age people”, a people supposedly without culture or history. Informed by the work of anthropologists who fought against these prejudices, my novel tries to uncover our shared humanity."