Estelle Nollet – 2013
Estelle Nollet was born in 1978 in the Central African Republic and moved to France a few years later. Following her studies as a graphic artist in Paris, she worked in advertising in France and elsewhere, before taking up a second career as a diver and working as an instructor in a number of countries (Australia, the US, New Zealand, Mexico…). She says diving into the world of silence is like discovering a book in movement where there’s a new story happening mutely every second.
Estelle has published two novels, both with major publishing house Albin Michel. Her first, On ne boit pas les rats kangourous (2009) (You don’t drink kangaroo rats), is set in Australia, where she has travelled. It has been compared to the work of Cormac MacCarthy, and was awarded several prizes for emerging novelists.
The second novel, Le bon, la brute, etc (2011) (The good man, the brute, etc) took ou the Prix Gironde (for ‘new writing’) and is described as an international road-movie novel.
Estelle Nollet plans to write at the cottage for four months, from January to early May 2013.
Florence Cadier was born in 1956 and is a journalist by profession. In 1995, inspired by her two children Bastien and Valentine, she began to write children’s stories and young adult novels. Many of her books have been translated including Qui est Laurette? (Who is Laurette?), Les miens aussi (Mine too), Ils divorcent (They are getting divorced), 24 histories pour attendre Noël (24 stories for the lead-up to Christmas) and Dessine avec Mila (Drawing with Mila). She was awarded a number of prizes, including the town of Poitiers’ historic novel award and the Literary Al Terre Ado prize, for Le rêve de Sam (Sam’s Dream). Her most recent novel is L’été des amours (Summer of loves), published in March 2011 by Oslo.
Yann Apperry is a bilingual French-American who writes in both languages and translates his own texts with elegance and finesse. He is an accomplished novelist, playwright, poet and librettist. In France, he is considered one of the most talented writers of the young generation. Born in 1972, Yann published his first novel Qui Vive at the age of 25 and was immediately acclaimed by critics and awarded the “Prix Bretagne.
Fariba Hachtroudi is a French writer and Iranian exile born in Tehran in 1951, and the daughter of the eminent mathematician and champion of democracy Moschen Hachtroudi. She studied art and archaeology in France, moving there when she was a teenager. Despite the distance from her homeland, the Islamic revolution in Iran left her feeling bewildered. In 1981, she decided to move to Sri Lanka where she taught at Colombo University.
Olivier Bleys was born in Lyon in 1970. He holds masters’ degrees in modern literature, computer graphics and cultural project management. Author of historical novels as well as essays and travel stories, Olivier won the young novelist’s prize for The Island at the age of twenty-two. Three years later his second book, The Prince of the Fork, received a national prize. His third novel, Pastel, was translated into several foreign languages and rewarded by the French Academy.
Nicolas Kurtovitch was born in Noumea in 1955. His mother’s side of the family first settled in New Caledonia in 1843. He also has Yugoslavian origins, through his father, who left Sarajevo in 1945. After completing his schooling in New Caledonia, Nicolas travelled to New Zealand and Australia, eager to experience and absorb the diversity of the South Pacific. He then completed further study in France (Aix-en-Provence, 1977-1980), obtaining a degree in Geography before returning to New Caledonia where he took up a teaching position at Lifou.
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).
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).
Charles Juliet was the second French writer, after Nadine Ribault in 2002, to be awarded the residency. Juliet is a 69 year-old poet and novelist who shares his time between Lyons in central France and the nearby village of Jujurieux where he was born. A great admirer of Katherine Mansfield, Charles Juliet also loves the game of rugby. The French laureate has published over thirty books including collections of poems, short stories, autobiographical novels (Lambeaux, L’Année de l’éveil) and plays.