Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist - International One-Day Colloquium
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Michaël Ferrier is a prize-winning novelist, essayist and academic whose cosmopolitan life – he grew up in Chad and France, has Mauritian roots and lives in Japan – has inspired him to write some fascinating novels that cross generic and geographical boundaries. His works explore themes as various as an African childhood, notions of Frenchness, inter-identities, and post-Fukushima life in Japan. Hybridity is key to his themes, forms and genres, and his works include – as befits a twenty-first century author – a website called ‘Tokyo-Time-Table’.
This conference will bring together scholars from the UK, the US, France and Japan, as well as the author himself. It takes place on the occasion of the publication, by Liverpool University Press, of the very first monograph to be published on Ferrier’s writings – by Akane Kawakami (Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist: French Without Borders, 2023) and the English translation of Ferrier’s Scrabble by Martin Munro (2022). Both books will be available at the conference.
Speakers will include Fabien Arribert-Narce, Timo Obergoker, Bernadette Cailler and Akane Kawakami. All are welcome, and we hope for rich and varied discussions about the work of one of the rising stars of contemporary French and Francophone literature, a unique voice that crosses all kinds of borders across the globe.
Contact name:
Akane Kawakami