Etonnants Voyageurs, St Malo
Sunday 19 May 3:30pm CEST
Style vs Content
Keynote by: Hubert Haddad
Participants include: Patrick Deville, Björn Larsson, Kenneth White, Yanick Lahens, Sami Tchak, Helonla Habi, Azouz Begag, Yann Queffelec, Mbarek Beyrouk, Ben Fountain, Scholastique Mukasonga, Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, Jean-Paul Kauffmann, Kim Thuy, Yahia Belaskri, Sefi Atta, John Connolly, Diana Evans, Holly Goddard Jones, Kopano Matlwa, Gaspard-Marie Janvier, Pinar Selek, Clément Caliari, Murray Bail, Ariane Dreyfus.
Author Biography:
Born in Tunis in 1947, Hubert Abraham Haddad went to France with his parents several years later, first to Belleville, Ménilmontant, and then to the housing projects. He lived the difficult life of the immigrant growing up, with a shop-keeper father and a mother of Algerian origin. He evoked this childhood in his story Le Camp du bandit Mauresque (The Camp of the Moorish Bandit) (Fayard, 2005).
His first collection of poems, Le Charnier déductif (Deductive Mass Grave), appeared in 1967. His first story, written at the same time and entitled Armelle ou l’éternel Retour (Armelle or the Eternal Return), was not published until 1989. Starting with Un rêve de glace (A Dream of Ice) (Albin Michel, 1974; Zulma, 2005), he has continuously produced novels and collections of stories, alternating with essays on art or literature, plays, and collections of poems.
Haddad’s use of different genres and subjects combined with his extensive experience with writing workshops led him to write Le Nouveau Magasin d’écriture (The New Writing Store), a sort of encyclopedia of literature and the art of writing. This volume was followed in 2007 by the Nouveau Nouveau Magasin d’écriture (The New New Writing Store).
Haddad has received literary prizes for a number of his works, including the 1983 Georges Bernanos Prize for Les Effrois (The Terrors); the 1991 Maupassant Prize for Le Secret de l’immortalité (The Secret of Immortality); the 1998 SGDL (Société des gens de lettres/ Literary Society) Grand Prix for the Novel for La Condition magique (The Magical Condition); the 2008 Five Francophonie Continents Prize and the 2009 Prix Renaudot Poche for Palestine.