Welcome to Ægitna: A Little Forge of Letters
Version en Français : ICI
The Ægitna Literary Agency – pronounce [a-eʒitna] – was launched in Lyon in January 2023 by Raphaël Thierry, who holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Lorraine (France) and of the University of Yaounde 1 (Cameroon). Raphaël is supported by writers and publisher friends.
Our project is dedicated to world literature and targets unconventional fiction and non-fiction publications and translations.
Authors and books from publishers from Senegal, Cameroon, France, Somalia, Italy, Haiti, Morocco, Nigeria, United Kingdom, Zimbabwe, Togo, Benin, South Africa, Mali, Guinea, Congo (Kinshasa), Ivory Coast, etc have honoured… Ægitna, with their trust.
Ægitna is notably collaborating with legendary Présence Africaine Editions, which has, since 1949, been both a symbol and lighthouse for thoughts and literature of African origin writers.
Ægitna’s ambition is to contribute to the diversification of international literature and production knowledge, to more accurately reflect the multitudes of intellectual and aesthetic horizons and places of publication.
Ægitna’s name in homage to the Cannes printing press of the same name, whose founders’s activity, commitment and political and intellectual values contributed to an important opening of intellectual and educational spheres of the 20th century. One of the very first anthologies of Cameroonian literature was published on their presses in 1961, and Célestin and Elise Freinet also printed and experimented with many of their methods there.
Finally, Ægitna is a reference to this “uncertain” place that Mediterranean, Etruscan civilization that nonetheless escapes oblivion, , but whose influence in the past reminds us that history is an incessant transmission, never lost, a constant reconnection that goes way beyond present geographies. It’s about confidently taking a position in a history.
Ægitna Literary Agency is a collaborative project – hence the “about us” – slightly iconoclastic, that evokes a little forge for the production and promotion of literature and non-fiction.
The aim is to offer a long-term space, place of origin and convergence, in which authors and partner publishers feel at home, and are able to define themselves through literature.
Ægitna’s priority is to respect everyone’s talent and rights, and to entrust their works to demanding publishers, to circulate in different languages, without restrictions so that they can forever go farther.
Ægitna is anchored in the concrete reality of the book chain, and diversity of landscapes: a mobile project, with the human dimension at its heart, a project filled with optimism, because literature and knowledge represent a magnificent and infinite space.
Raphael Thierry
