Jean Echenoz

Jean Echenoz is one of the world’s leading contemporary authors, and his work has already influenced a number of younger writers. Born in Orange on December 26, 1947, the son of a psychiatrist, he spent his early childhood in Aveyron and moved to Paris in 1970 after studying sociology. He briefly worked for L’Humanité and AFP. In 1979, his first book, Le Méridien de Greenwich, was a critical success and won the Prix Fénéon. Since then, he has published eighteen novels, all with Éditions de Minuit, up to his latest to date, Bristol. He has won a dozen literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis in 1983 for Cherokee and the Prix Goncourt in 1999 for Je m’en vais.

Heir to the New Novel through his rigorous work on language and the possibilities of narrative, he sets himself apart from it through the ironic, playful aspects of his novels, populated by tired, floating, derisory characters, placed in surprising or incongruous situations. In fact, his style draws on a wide range of influences and quotations, from Laurence Sterne and Diderot to spy novels. He also draws heavily on the cinematic imagination, and integrates the soundtrack of jazz with its variations, syncopations and dissonances. He cultivates a close complicity with his faithful readers, whom he never hesitates to challenge or reward with self-citations. Jean Echenoz shatters both the conventions of the realist novel and those of the New Novel in a style of writing that, beneath its distanced and playful exterior, transcribes a very postmodern anguish.