Kester Grant

Thank you for having me.

Yes.

So technically on paper, English is the national language.

But in fact, that's a bit of a fallacy because we were a French colony before being a British colony.

Most people can speak English.

The language that most people are more comfortable in is French.

If you go into a little corner shop on the side of the street, mostly they speak English to foreigners and French to the locals.

And, of course, we have our own dialect of Creole.

Yes, I think so.

Definitely the fact that I grew up in Mauritius meant that I had that access to French literature.

Even if you think in terms of like TV, there were as many French cartoons that we grew up watching as English cartoons.

And I was able to have all of Victor Hugo's works in the original French in my school library.

So there was almost no barrier.

And actually, interestingly enough,

One of my best friends, she went to a French school.

I actually went to an English school and she hated her homework.

And every day I would stop by her houses on the way home from me and I would stop by and help her with her French history homework mainly.

So I spent all of my time reading all about the revolution, and that's where my real passion for both literature and French history was born, having to create essays for her and dictate them to her.

She had to write it in her own writing so that they thought she was the one doing the work, obviously.

Well, each character who is a member of the Court of Miracles, the Court of Miracles is an underworld criminal society, something we would today call the mafia.