A gifted Senegalese student and novelist who was reported missing in France has said she was on "a little break to regain her senses" in a letter sent to a government minister, reports BBC News.
Diary Sow, 20, did not return to school in Paris after the Christmas holidays, causing concern in Senegal and France.
Ms Sow won two awards as Senegal's best student and has been studying at the prestigious Louis-Le-Grand school.
French prosecutors had opened an investigation into her disappearance.
But in a letter she sent to Senegal's Water and Sanitation Minister Serigne Mbaye Thiam, Ms Sow said she was "not the victim of any kind of pressure" and apologised to those worried about her.
"I am not hiding. I'm not running away. See it as a kind of welcome respite from my life," she wrote.
She said her failure to show up for school on 4 January was not "about overwork, or madness, or the desire for freedom".
"I am not sorry to have left, I am sorry for the inconvenience caused by my departure and for the people I made suffer," she said.