At Home with Literati: Spencer Wolff & Nyuol Lueth Tong

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The Fire in His Wake, Spencer Wolff’s exuberant debut novel, tells the story of two men swept up in refugee crises of the twenty-first century: Simon, a young employee at the UNHCR in Morocco, and Arès, a Congolese locksmith left for dead in the wake of ethnic violence.

“A devastating and infuriating story written with compassion, style, and grace. Beyond the harrowing depictions of torture and war, this chilling tale of a heartbreaking life is, at its core, a struggle to come to terms with something much worse: the maddening hypocrisy at our borders, the violence that Western powers inflict on the stories of refugees who arrive at their doors.”
—Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee

Spencer Wolff is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist based in Paris, France. An adjunct faculty member of the École normale supérieure (Paris), he teaches a Master’s course focused on the history of diaspora and migration. A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School, he worked at the UN Refugee Bureau (UNHCR) in Rabat, Morocco in 2009. The Fire in his Wake is his first novel.

Nyuol Lueth Tong is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Bare Life Review. Editor of There Is a Country (McSweeney’s, 2013), Tong studied philosophy and comparative literature at Duke University, where he was a Reginaldo Howard Memorial Scholar, and fiction (MFA) at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching-Writing Fellow. Tong’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Baffler, Transect Magazine, NPR, New Sudan, and Gurtong, among other publications.