Marie-Thérèse Colimon-Hall (1918 - 1997), born Marie-Thérèse Colimon, was a Haiti

Haiti

Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

an writer.

Born in Port-au-Prince

Port-au-Prince

Port-au-Prince is the capital and largest city of the Caribbean nation of Haiti. The city's population was 704,776 as of the 2003 census, and was officially estimated to have reached 897,859 in 2009....

, Coliman began her writing career as a playwright and published five plays between 1949 and 1960. In 1974 she published her first and most well-known novel, Fils de Misère. She also wrote essays, short stories, and children's literature. Colimon's keen observations of the Haitian people's struggle against poverty

Poverty

Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

 gave a particularly poignancy to her work, as demonstrated by Fils de Misère. In Les Chants des sirenes, her collection of short stories, she explored the painful impact of the Haitian diaspora

Diaspora

A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...

on both the individuals in exile and the Haitian community.