Annie Saumont – 2006
Annie Saumont has been writing short stories for twenty years and with 200 to her name, she is considered as a reference for short story writers. She has received a number of prizes including the coveted Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix de l’Académie Française (for her entire body of work).
Her short stories find their origins in simple facts, combined to create an everyday universe for her very human characters where cause and effect are played out. Her characters are often damaged, unassuming, frail anti-heroes deprived of a future after committing inadmissible errors.
Greatly appreciated by a wide-range of readers, particularly (but not only) teenagers, with whom she instills a desire to read, Annie Saumont is also a well-known personality in the education sector, where she often gives talks about her work and her creative process. Two books are even aimed more at schools than the general public.
She is also a specialist in English-language literature and a translator, having translated works by John Fowles, VS Naipaul and JD Salinger to name but a few.
The Resource Centre at the Alliance Française in Wellington carries a selection of her work.
Dominique Mainard (1967-) is a novelist, short story writer and translator and has developed her passion for New Zealand literature through the works of Janet Frame, whose writing she has translated since 1994 (Owls do Cry, Joëlle Losfeld). After publishing three short story anthologies, including Le Second Enfant, for which she received the Prix Prométhée de la nouvelle in 1994 (La Différence), and Le Grenadier (Gallimard, 1997), Mainard published her first novel in 2001, Le Grand Fakir (Joëlle Losfeld) set in a cruel world inhabited by strange and gruesome creatures.
Pierre Furlan (1943- ) was born in southwestern France in 1943, he spent his adolescence in California and studied at UC Berkeley. He then settled permanently in Paris. Furlan is the author of five books of fiction and is also well known as a literary translator. It is in fact by translating three contemporary New Zealand writers — first Alan Duff, then Elizabeth Knox and Geoff Cush — that he established the special link that brought him to New Zealand. Pierre Furlan’s writing thrives on the gap between fantasy and reality, questioning the familiarity of our everyday world, as evidenced in his book of stories L’Atelier de Barbe-bleue (Bluebeard’s Workshop, 2002).
Nadine Ribault (1964–2021) was born in Paris and travelled a great deal during her childhood, to Africa, Holland and Scotland. She obtained a BA in French literature at La Sorbonne in Paris, then taught French in the Lorraine region in France. Ribault then went on to spend several years in Japan, teaching French language and French literature. It was during this time where she wrote a great deal and was involved in organizing lithographies exhibitions.