WRITERS

Alain Fleischer 
La Hache et Le Violon (2004)
(France)
Born in Paris in 1944, Alain Fleischer studied at La Sorbonne and the Ecole

des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He taught in the University of Paris III, in the University of Quebec in Montreal and in various art, photography and cinema schools (e.g. IDHEC/FEMIS). He won the Prix de Rome and spent some time in the Villa Médicis from 1985 to 1987. At the request of the French Ministry of Culture he created the National Studio for Contemporary Arts. A film director, he has directed more than 140 films: feature films, experimental cinema, and art documentaries. He is also a visual artist and there have been many exhibitions of his work, both in France and abroad. Author of around 20 books (novels, short stories, essays on photography and cinema), he has become more prolific in recent years. His recent book, La Hache et le Violon, was published in 2004 by Editions du Seuil.

Jacques Godbout
Opération Rimbaud (1999)
(Canada)
Born in 1933 in Montreal, Jacques Godbout is a poet, novelist and

filmmaker. He started out as a poet with Les Pavés secs (1958) and C’est la chaude loi des hommes (1960). Later, he wrote mostly novels L’Aquarium (1962), Le couteau sur la table (1965), Salut Galarneau ! (1967), L’Isle au dragon (1976), Les têtes à Papineau (1981), Une histoire américaine (1986), Le temps des Galarneau (1993) and Opération Rimbaud (1999). At the same time, he directed numerous fiction and documentary films and also worked for radio. He has been part of the most important years of literary and political modernity in Quebec. He helped establish the magazine Liberté. He was the first president of the Quebec Writers’ Association (UNEQ), which he helped create in 1977. His novel Salut Galarneau ! quickly became a modern-day classic in the literature of Quebec.

Jean Grégor 
L’Ami de Bono (2005)
(France)
Born  on  5th  March  1968,  Jean Grégor  published   his   first   novel 

Turbulences, a satire on the ills of modern society, in 2000. It is a satire on the ills of our modern society. Frigo, his second novel, was published in 2001, and is a story which, with great irony, shows the dangers which face our modern world; Jeunes cadres sans tête, which came out in 2003, is a metaphorical story on social violence and cynicism in business. His latest novel L’Ami de Bono, came out in February 2005, and portrays the seventies generation in France: “to know who I am, listen to the music I like”. In January, Jean Grégor travelled by bicycle from Paris to Dublin, to give his book to the U2 singer.

Rita Ann Higgins
An Awful Racket (2001) 
(Ireland)
Poet and playwright. Born in Galway in 1955,  her formal education ceased

when she was a teenager. She was self-taught later when recovering from tuberculosis. She received bursaries in 1986, 1989, and 1996 from the Arts Council, broadcast and travelled extensively giving readings and workshops, and in 1989 won the Peadar O'Donnell Award. Writer in Residence at UCG 1995/96, Rita Ann Higgins is a member of Aosdána. She published five collections with Salmon Poetry: Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986), Witch in the Bushes (1988), Goddess and Witch (1990), Philomena’s Revenge (1992), and Higher Purchase (1996). Bloodaxe has published her last two collections: Sunny Side Plucked, New and Selected Poems (1996), which was awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 1996; and An Awful Racket (2001). Rita Ann Higgins was described in The Irish Times as “an anarchic chronicler of the Irish Dispossessed.”

Catherine Lépront
Des Gens du Monde (2003)
(France)
Catherine Lépront is  a writer,  an author of novels,  tales,  short stories

a biography of Clara Schumann, an essay on Caspar David Friedrich, a radio play and screenplays. She has also worked for the theatre (treatises on dramatic art, translations, and adaptations) and worked on newspapers and reviews (Avant-Scène Opéra, NRF, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, etc.). She obtained the Prix Goncourt for her novel Trois gardiennes (Gallimard 1992) and the Grand Prix Thyde Monnier, from the Société des Gens de Lettres, for her entire work, with the publication of Namokel (Seuil, 1997). She is a reader for French literature, with Gallimard publishing, and has also worked closely on the collection named Du Monde Entier. Her most recent works to be published with Seuil are: L'affaire du Museum, (1998), Le cahier de moleskine noir du délateur Mikhaïl, (2000), 1052 ou La femme du transtlantique, (2001) and Le café Zimmerman, (2001).

Deirdre Madden
Authenticity (2002)
(Ireland)
Deirdre Madden was born in 1960. Her novels include The  Birds  of  the 

Innocent Wood, for which she was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, Remembering Light and Stone, and One By One in the Darkness, which won the Kerry Book of the Year Award. Her most recent novel is Authenticity. She is currently teaching on the MA programme at the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at Trinity College, Dublin. Her work has been translated into several languages, and she is a member of Aosdána.

Tom Paulin
The Road to Inver: Translations, Versions and Imitations 1975-2003 (2004)
(England)

Tom Paulin was born in Leeds in 1949but grew up in Belfast and as a result, although born in England, considers himself as Northern Irish and as one of the ‘school of Ulster poets’. He is a lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford. His first collection of poetry, A State of Justice, won a Somerset Maugham award in 1977. Published in 1980, his second collection, The Strange Museum, was awarded the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1982. Tom Paulin's third volume of poetry, Liberty Tree, was published in 1983 and his fourth volume, Fivemiletown, was published in 1987. His version of Antigone-The Riot Act toured Ireland in 1984 and has been staged several times since then. Tom Paulin is a Director of the Derry-based Field Day Theatre Company. He has edited two collections for Faber and Faber. Walking a Line was published in 1994 and The Invasion Handbook in 2002.

Hans Pleschinksi
Bildnis eines Unsichtbaren (2002)
(Germany)
Hans Pleschinski was born in Celle, Germany in 1956. He studied German

French and Theatre in Munich. He worked for galleries, opera houses and in film. He has been working for Bavarian Radio since 1985 and lives in Munich as a freelance author. For his literary work Pleschinski received the State Prize for Writers in Bavaria in 1986, a scholarship by the German Literature Foundation in 1990, and a literature scholarship awarded by the city of Munich in 1991.  He was also awarded the Tukan Prize, donated by the city of Munich, in 1995 for his novel Brabant and in 2002 for his novel Bildnis eines Unsichtbaren (Picture of an Invisible).

Silke Scheuermann
Der zärtlichste Punkt im All (2004)
(Germany)
Silke  Scheuermann was  born on  15
1973 in Karlsruhe. She studied 

literature and theatre in Frankfurt, where she now lives and works as a freelance author. Silke Scheuermann is rightly regarded as one of Germany’s most significant contemporary poets. Her eagerly anticipated prose debut, Reiche Mädchen (Rich Girls), is an ironic, laconic, amusing and razor-sharp depiction of a generation desirous of the ordinary while yearning for the out-of-the-ordinary. Her poetry collection, Der Tag an dem die Möwen zweistimmig sangen, was published in 2001 (Edition Suhrkamp). She is the recipient of the prestigious Leonce-und-Lena literary prize (2001), and has been awarded a number of fellowships and grants, including the German Literature Foundation (2002) and Literary Colloquium in Berlin (2002). She is currently Writer-in-Residence at the artist village Künstlerdorf Worpswede.