Autumn Letters Festival

Pierre Ducrozet has been traveling the world since he was 20. He weaves stories in perpetual motion that capture the impulses of our time and question our relationship to the world. He is the author of several novels including Requiem pour Lola rouge (Grasset, 2010, Prix de la Vocation 2011), Eroica (Grasset, 2015) biographical fiction around the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, L’invention des corps (Actes Sud, 2017) which earned him the Prix de Flore and Le grand vertige (Actes Sud, 2020). Pierre Ducrozet has also co-authored several books for young people about major contemporary issues and writes a column in Libération.

Some of his columns have been collected in a collection published by in 2020: Partir léger. In 2022, he published his sixth novel, also with Actes Sud: Variations de Paul.

“Every era has its own specific literary forms that embody representations of the world. I believe that ours calls for open, intersecting, shifting narratives, in the image of a diffracted reality. These new narratives will perhaps allow us to better grasp it, or even to have a hold on it. There are many of us asking ourselves these questions, on all continents and in all artistic practices. ” Pierre Ducroze

Alice Zeniter dreamed of being a novelist at an early age, writing her first book at the age of 16. Six other novels followed, including Sombre dimanche (Prix du Livre Inter 2013) and L’Art de perdre, which has been a tremendous success and has been awarded numerous literary prizes (including the Goncourt des lycéens 2017).

Alice Zeniter also invested in the world of theater from the beginning of her career. She collaborated with several directors and created the theater company L’Entente Cordiale within which she mounted various shows. In 2020, she created her first one-woman show, which she later published with the title Je suis une fille sans histoire. As an extension of this reflection on the power of narratives, in 2022 she published Toute une moitié du monde (Flammarion).

“I never understand things better, than when I am writing them, and writing gives me a laboratory of understanding. For me, literature is the place of time and doubt, not the place to deliver a message. But I also consider that one of the things that literature can do is to work on changing the way we look at things, to reconfigure representations, and to allow us to reappropriate the things around us in a different way.” Alice Zeniter