Author: Admin

Talk

Noémi Lefebvre’s Blue Self-Portrait (Les Fugitives) is a novel of angst and high farce, caught between contrary impulses to remember and to ignore. She will be in conversation with Baileys Prize for Women’s fiction winner Eimear McBride, whose latest novel is The Lesser Bohemians (Faber). Chaired by translator Sophie Lewis.

Following this dialogue, Noemi will be joined by two up and coming writers from Editions Verticales: Pierre Senges, known for his radio adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, as well as for his quirky, poetic Lichtenberg Fragments (Dalkey Archive), and Quebec-born Hélène Frédérick. Conversations with the writers will be accompanied by a series of readings on realism, literary debt and new forms of writing, introduced by Emmanuel Bouju (IUF) and Jeanne Guyon (Verticales).

In partnership with the Literature under Constraint programme (IMLR), Editions Verticales and IUF (Institut Universitaire de France).

Related / Latest Publications:

	Noémi Lefebvre, Blue Self-Portrait, translated by Sophie Lewis (Les Fugitives, June 2017)
	Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber&Faber, September 2016)
	Hélène Frédérick, Forêt Contraire (Verticales, February 2014)
	Pierre Senges, Antonio de Guevara, The Major Refutation, translated by Jacob Siefring (Contra Mundum Press, December 2016)
	Pierre Senges, Fragments of Lichtenberg, translated by Gregory Flanders (Dalkey Archive Press, January 2017)
	Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press, June 2013)

Film
dir. Jean Becker, 2018, 83 mins

Adapted from The Red Collar by Prix Goncourt winner Jean-Christophe Rufin, Jean Becker’s WW1 drama tells the story of a war hero, held prisoner in an abandoned barracks under the crushing heat of summer, and awaiting his interrogation by a corrupt judge to the sound of his mangy dog barking night and day.

Preceded by an introduction by Adriana Hunter, who translated Jean-Christophe Rufin’s novel The Red Collar from French to English

Related / Latest Publications:

	Jean-Christophe Rufin, The Red Collar, translated by Adriana Hunter (Europa Editions, July 2015)
	Jean-Christophe Rufin, The Santiago Pilgrimage: Walking the Immortal Way, translated by Malcolm Imrie (MacLehose Press, April 2017)

Talk and Screening

Talented French publisher and film director Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, founder of POL, died in January 2018. In a series of pop-up readings introduced by writer and translator Frédéric Boyer, two of Paul's authors, Goncourt prize winner Atiq Rahimi and Medicis prize winner Marie Darrieussecq, will be joined by guests Catriona Seth, Adrian Rifkin, Christopher MacLehose, Dominic Glynn and Stefan Tobler, who will read from some of the best authors he published: Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Louis Schefer, Olivier Cadiot, Emmanuelle Pagano, Emmanuel Carrère...

Followed by an exceptional screening, in French, of Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens' film Editeur.

Related events:

	Atiq Rahimi
	Marie Darrieussecq

Related / Latest Publications:

	Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, translated by Linda Coverdale (Faber&Faber, June 2003)
	Marie Darrieussecq, Being Here is Everything, translated by Penny Hueston (Semiotext(e), April 2018)
	Atiq Rahimi, The Patience Stone, translated by Polly McLean (Vintage, January 2011)

Talk

In Being Here Is Everything (Semiotext(e)) Marie Darrieussecq traces the short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907), who despite being a woman became one of her generation’s preeminent artists. In this exceptional London appearance, Marie Darrieussecq will also be talking about her other books, including Pig Tales (Faber).
Chaired by Lisa Allardice.

Related event:

Publishing à la française: Frédéric Boyer, Atiq Rahimi & Marie Darrieussecq

Related / Latest Publications:

	Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, translated by Linda Coverdale (Faber&Faber, June 2003)
	Marie Darrieussecq, Being Here is Everything, translated by Penny Hueston (Semiotext(e), April 2018)

Film
dir. Terry Braun, 1992, 120 mins

Television Degree Zero was a special edition of BBC’s The Late Show (1990): a pithy deconstruction of the legacy of one of France’s most influential intellectuals, Roland Barthes, whose essay The Death of the Author first appeared in France in 1968. The screening is preceded by a selection of interview clips with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, as part of Radical Broadcasters Theory On TV.

The screening will be preceded by an introduction by Film Critic Brian Dillon

Related / Latest Publication:

Tiphaine Samoyault, Barthes. A Biography, translated by Andrew Brown (Polity Press, January 2017)

Talk

Writer and filmmaker Atiq Rahimi left Afghanistan for France in the 1980s, where he spent 18 years in exile. He won the 2008 Goncourt Prize for The Patience Stone (Penguin), his first book to be written directly in French, as a way to escape the “involuntary self-censorship” he feels when writing in Persian. The novel portrays a young woman's attempt to keep her husband alive as she rages against men, war, culture, God. Atiq Rahimi has since continued to write about language, political violence, historical belonging and migration. In partnership with English PEN who have supported the English editions of Patience Stone and A Curse on Dostoevsky.
Chaired by Antonia Byatt.

Related event:

Publishing à la française: Frédéric Boyer, Atiq Rahimi & Marie Darrieussecq

Related / Latest Publication:

Atiq Rahimi, The Patience Stone, translated by Polly McLean (Vintage, January 2011)

Talk

A new voice in literary fiction, Franco-Venezuelan author Miguel Bonnefoy made a breakthrough with his debut Octavio's Journey. Compared to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, his second novel Black Sugar (Gallic) tells the tale of a family’s changing fortunes in Venezuela over the course of the 20th century. Chaired by Daniel Hahn.

Related / Latest Publication:

Miguel Bonnefoy, Black Sugar, translated by Emily Boyce (Gallic, March 2018)

Film
dir. Brian de Palma, 1974, 92 mins

Composer Winslow Leach hides his wounded face beneath a sinister silver mask and writes his music for the woman he loves. Betrayed by evil producer Swan, he decides to haunt his rock palace, the Paradise. Brian de Palma’s rock opera is a flamboyant horror comedy loosely adapted from Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera.

The screening will be preceded by an introduction by Dr Annette Davison (University of Edinburgh)

Related / Latest Publication:

Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera, translated by Mireille Ribière (Penguin Classics, April 2012)

Talk

Celebrating Gaston Leroux’s 150th birthday, Dr Cormac Newark (Guildhall School of Music & Drama), Dr Annette Davison (University of Edinburgh) and Dr John Snelson (Royal Opera House) will explore the very many ways opera’s most famous off-shoot, The Phantom of the Opera, has inspired and infiltrated cultures around the world, offering a rich subject for re-interpretation in media ranging from ballet to musical theatre.

Experts from the worlds of literature, film and opera will look in particular at the very many screen adaptations of Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1909-10) in places as far apart as Latin America and China, showing how this unique record of the most important social and artistic institution in the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, Paris, has proved no less meaningful in the period since its publication.

This event is a collaboration with Screen adaptations of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra: Routes of Cultural Transfer, a research project led by Dr Cormac Newark of Guildhall School of Music & Drama and generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

https://thephantomonfilm.com/

Related / Latest Publication:

Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera, translated by Mireille Ribière (Penguin Classics, April 2012)

Talk

Laurent Gaudé won the Goncourt prize in 2004 for The House of Scorta. His latest novel Hell’s Gate (Gallic, tr. Emily Boyce) is a thrilling story of love, loss, revenge and redemption in Naples and beyond, in which Gaudé questions the power of origins, death and family ties. In the presence of translator Adriana Hunter.

Related / Latest Publications:

	Laurent Gaudé, Death of an Ancient King, translated by Adriana Hunter (4th Estate, 2004)
	Laurent Gaudé, Hell’s Gate, translated by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken (Gallic, April 2017)