Archives: Bio

Born in 1972, Laurent Gaudé is one of France’s most highly respected playwrights and novelists. He has won many prizes including the Goncourt in 2004 for The Scortas’ Sun, published in 34 countries. In a survey by leading French trade magazine Livres Hebdo, Hell’s Gate was chosen by booksellers as the highlight of the 2008 rentrée season.

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)

Born in Québec, Hélène Frédérick worked for independent bookshops and for the Réseau Art Actuel Québec. She is currently writing radiophonic fictions and literary reviews. Her first novel La poupée de Kokoschka (Verticales, 2010) was published in 2014 in Montréal and she published a second novel, Forêt Contraire, with Verticales in 2014.

Related / Latest Publication:

Hélène Frédérick, Forêt Contraire (Verticales, February 2014)

Flora Fishbach has never done things the way others do. After she tried a bit of painting, photography and odd jobs, she got completely carried away by a concert by Patti Smith during a homage to French poet Arthur Rimbaud in her native city of the Ardennes. In her family, whether you're a butcher, a housewife or a nurse, you live your life to its fullest. She decided to take the step, erase a letter in her mother's maiden name and became Fishbach. Her voice echoes like an incantation and becomes, in turn, intimate and powerful. Her artistic qualities have also led her to the cinema, as she will be starring in the adaptation of Virginie Despente's Vernon Subutex.

Related / Latest Publication:

Virginie Despentes, Vernon Subutex 1, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press, June 2017)

Lauren Elkin’s essays have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, frieze, and the Times Literary Supplement, and she is a contributing editor at The White Review. Her novel Floating Cities was published in French by Héloïse d’Ormesson, translated by Jean Lineker as Une Année à Venise. Her last book, Flâneuse (Chatto & Windus) is part cultural meander, part memoir, and traces the relationship between the city and creativity through a journey that begins in New York and moves us to Paris, via Venice, Tokyo and London, exploring along the way the paths taken by the flâneuses who have lived and walked in those cities.

Related / Latest Publication:

Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse. Women Walk the City (Vintage, July 2017)

Virginie Despentes is a writer and filmmaker, and former maid, sex worker, and freelance rock journalist. Her first novel, Baise-Moi, a controversial story of rape and revenge, was published in 1992 and adapted for film in 2000. Upon release it became the first film to be banned in France for twenty-eight years. She is the author of over fifteen further works, including Apocalypse Baby (2010) and Bye Bye Blondie (2004), and the autobiographical essay, King Kong Theory (2006). The first title in her Vernon Subutex trilogy was first published by Grasset in French in 2013, with the second and third titles following in 2015 and 2017. It is published in English by MacLehose Press in a translation by Frank Wynne, and shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.

Related / Latest Publication:

Virginie Despentes, Vernon Subutex 1, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press, June 2017)

Annette Davison is senior lecturer in the Reid School of Music at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the history, theory and analysis of audiovisual media, particularly cinema and television. Her monographs include Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: cinema soundtracks in the 1980s–1990s (Ashgate, 2004) and Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow, 2009) as well as co-edited collections of essays on the work of David Lynch and sonic practice in the ‘silent’ era in Britain. More recently she has been working on the main title and end credit sequences for television serials, and on industrial films. Her articles have been published in journals such as Music, Sound and the Moving Image (2014), SoundEffects (2013), and American Music (2011).

Marie Darrieussecq published her first novel, Pig Tales, in 1996 at the age of twenty-seven with P.O.L., and it became an overnight sensation and bestseller, selling more than 300,000 copies and translated into more than thirty languages. The New Yorker described her as France’s “best young novelist,” and she is recognized as one of the leading voices of French contemporary literature. Her novel Men was awarded the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix in 2013. Her last book Being Here Is Everything traces the short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907). It is translated by Penny Hueston and published by Semiotext(e).

www.mariedarrieussecq.com

Related / Latest Publications:

	Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales, translated by Linda Coverdale (Faber&faber, June 2003)
	Marie Darrieussecq, Being Here is Everything (Text publishing , July 2017)
	Marie Darrieussecq, Being Here is Everything, translated by Penny Hueston (Semiotext(e), April 2018)
	Virginia Woolf, Un lieu à soi, translated by Marie Darrieussecq (Denoël, January 2016)

Frédéric Boyer is a French writer and translator, published in France by P.O.L. Discovered by Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, who passed away in 2018, Boyer is now his successor as head of the publishing house. His work includes translations of Saint Augustine (awarded the 2008 Prix Jules Janin) and Shakespeare, as well as the coordination of new translations of the Bible for Bayard. His 1993 novel Des choses idiotes et douces won the Prix du Livre Inter 1993, and Cows was published by Noemi Press in 2014.

Related / Latest Publications:

	Frederic Boyer, Cows, translated by Joanna Howard and Nicholas Bredie (Noemi Press, 2014)
	William Shakespeare, Tragédie du Roi Richard II, translated by Frédéric Boyer (P.O.L., June 2010)
	William Shakespeare, Sonnets, translated by Frédéric Boyer (P.O.L., June 2010)

A former pupil of the École Normale Supérieure, Emmanuel Bouju is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Rennes. He is the director of the “Groupe phi” (a research group in historical and comparative poetics). He has published several collective essays about politics and literature and is now leading a programme on Literature and Credit for the Institut Universitaire de France.

Franco-Venezuelan Miguel Bonnefoy was awarded the Prix du Jeune Ecrivain in 2013. Octavio’s Journey is Bonnefoy’s debut novel, written in French and published by Rivages. It has sold more than 25,000 copies in France and has been awarded the Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucauld (for debut novels – past winners include Goncourt winner Mathias Enard), the Prix Fénéon and the Prix de la Vocation, which rewards new talent. The book was also shortlisted for the Prix des Cinq Continents and the Goncourt First Novel Award. Black Sugar is Bonnefoy’s second novel; it was published by Gallic and translated by Emily Boyce.

Related / Latest Publications:

	Miguel Bonnefoy, Black Sugar, translated by Emily Boyce (Gallic, March 2018)
	Miguel Bonnefoy, Octavio's journey (Gallic, March 2017)