Isabelle Dupuy

Isabelle Dupuy left Haiti with a scholarship to go to university in America, dreaming of a safe job, a business career that would provide her with security, a good life and the ability to help her family.

She became a writer.

Her first novel, Living the Dream, was published by Jacaranda Books and was shortlisted for the Diverse Book award 2020 and was chosen in 2024 by the Tesco supermarket chain as their top title for Black History Month. It sold thousands of copies across fifty-five Tesco Superstores in the UK. Isabel was the only author invited to Netflix UK’s Black History Month event in October 2024.

Living the Dream tells the story of two immigrant mothers who meet at the gates of a private prep school in lush Hampstead, north London. As the friendship between their sons grow, one of the mothers, who is from Haiti, asks the other mother, who’s from Colombia, if she’d write down her life story for her little boy. ‘He only knows me as London Solange,’ she explains, ‘a woman out of context’. A discovery process begins that will shake the foundations of both their marriages and their perspectives on London and Britain.

Isabel recently finished her second book. The Debt is a historical novel based on the events of 1825 that led Haiti to accept a crippling debt with France despite having won the War of Independence.

Isabel’s writing has been published by the New York Times, The White Review, Litro and other publications. She has recently joined the editorial board of the WritersMosaic and regularly writes for the magazine. She’s currently writing a review of The Life of Herod the Great by Zora Neale Hurston for WritersMosaic.