Christian Lukeka Michel

My name is Christian Lukeka Michel. I was born on October 30, 2001, in Bukavu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I attended a Kimbanguist school, where I earned my diploma in general psycho-pedagogy.

As a graduate in general psycho-pedagogy, I spent years studying the human being: how we learn, how we grow, how we build ourselves up or break ourselves down. I learned developmental theories, the mechanisms of memory, and the inner workings of emotion, all while learning to observe and listen in order to understand.

But the truth is, nothing in my studies taught me as much about humanity as hermeticism and the act of writing.

Because creating characters is a kind of hermetic introspection: a way of crafting souls from the fragments of your own, giving them breath, a voice, wounds, and hopes that flow from your own strengths and flaws.

I have always dreamed of bringing fictional characters to life. Not in the sense of making them exist in the real world, but in the sense of making them so vivid that they keep breathing in the reader’s mind long after the last page is turned and push the reader to look inward as well.

Michael Lancilgon was born from that dream.

He carries my baptismal name and a part of my spirit: the calm I force myself to cultivate, that insatiable curiosity, and that offbeat humor which is my way of moving through the world without judging it. Michael is not me. He is much better than me. He is the version of myself I wish I could be: the one who does not judge, who does not impose his views, who does not rush, and who knows how to stop and watch an aurora borealis even when monsters are closing in. But he was born from my soul and my sleepless nights.