The Edinburg International Book Festival has just released their program: 900 authors from over 60 countries in more than 800 events for adults and children! And we are thrilled to present you with the French writers coming to the UK on this brilliant occasion.
Adélaïde Bon is a French writer, actress and voice artist born in 1981. A graduate of the Ecole Superieure d'Art Dramatique in Paris, she has an acting career in theatre and television, and works on issues of gender equality with the European Association Against Violence Against Women and Memoire Traumatique. She lives in Paris. The Little Girl on the Ice Floe is her first book, translated by Ruth Diver and published by MacLehose Press in the UK.
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008 and the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work.
Mathias Enard was born in 1972 in Niort. He studied at the Ecole du Louvre before studying Persian and Arabic at the INALCO. He spent long periods in the Middle East before settling in Barcelona where he worked with several cultural magazines, translated works from Persian and Arabic and taught Arabic at the university. His work as an author started with La Perfection du tir, a narrative novel about a sniper during war, taking place in a country that he does not mention, but could certainly be Lebanon. In 2015, Mathias Enard won the Prix Goncourt for Compass, the story of Franz Ritter, a musicologist who, during a sleepless night in Vienna, looks back on his life, his career, his stays in the Orient and his lover Sara. He was also shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, for Compass.
Marcus Malte was born in 1967. As a child, Malte immersed himself in literature, discovering the novels of John Steinbeck, Albert Cohen, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Giono. He began writing in elementary school and chose to major in film studies after graduating from high school. At twenty-three, Malte became a projectionist in Seyne-sur-Mer’s historical movie theater and soon wrote his first short stories. Later in the 1990s he began reaching broader audience with a series of novels, a couple of hard-boiled detective stories where Malte created the recurrent character of Mister, a jazz pianist. Marcus Malte’s fiction includes Garden of Love his first real success Les Harmoniques (Prix Mystère de la Critique, 2012) and more recently Le Garçon (The Boy) for which he received the famous Prix Femina (2016). The Boy is his first novel to be translated into English.
Jérôme Tubiana is a journalist and researcher. He has contributed to National Geographic and Foreign Affairs, among other publications. He first met Mohammed El-Gharani in N’Djamena in 2011, two years after his release from Guantánamo Bay. They met every afternoon for two weeks, after which Tubiana turned their conversations into a diary piece for the London Review of Books.
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