Writers & Presenters 2023
François-Henri Désérable
Born in Amiens, France, in 1987, François-Henri Désérable is a former professional hockey player, who started writing when he was 18. His first book was published by Gallimard (as were all his subsequent books) when he turned 25. Tu montreras ma tête au peuple (2013), short-stories about the French revolution, won several awards including the Prix de la Vocation. Two years later, he published Évariste (2015), a novel about Évariste Galois, a French mathematician who revolutionized algebra and died at the age of 20 from wounds suffered in a duel. It was awarded Le Prix des lecteurs de L’Express. Un certain M. Piekielny (2017), literary investigation around a character invented by Romain Gary, was translated into a dozen languages. In Mon maître et mon vainqueur (2021), he strived “to document the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion”, in the words of Annie Ernaux. The novel was awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française.
Giuliano da Empoli
Giuliano da Empoli is an Italian and Swiss writer and researcher. He is the founding chairman of Volta, a pro-European think tank based in Milan and a professor at Sciences-Po Paris. Prior to that he was Deputy Mayor for Culture in Florence and a Senior Advisor to the Italian Prime Minister. He also served as an Executive Board member at the Venice Biennale and established Italy’s first Design Council in 2007. At age twenty-two, his book about the problems faced by Italian youth, “Un grande futuro dietro di noi”, sprung a nation-wide debate that led the newspaper La Stampa to designate him “Man of the year”. Since then, he has published twelve more books, on subjects ranging from information overload (“Overdose”, 2002) to the dangers of hyper-specialization (“Contro gli specialisti”, 2013), to national-populist spin doctors (“Les ingénieurs du chaos”, Lattès, 2019). His first novel, "Le Mage du Kremlin" (Gallimard, 2022), has been awarded the "Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française" and is currently being translated in over thirty languages.
Sloane Crosley
Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and How Did You Get This Number, as well as Look Alive Out There (a 2019 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and the bestselling novels, The Clasp and Cult Classic. She served as editor of The Best American Travel Writing series and is featured in The Library of America's 50 Funniest American Writers, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay and others. Her next nonfiction book, Grief Is for People, will be published in 2024. She lives in New York City.
Jay McInerney
Jay McInerney is the critically acclaimed author of twelve books, the most recent being Bright, Precious Days (2016). Time Magazine cited his first bestselling novel, Bright Lights, Big City, as one of nine generation-defining novels of the twentieth century. Translated into more than 20 languages it has irrefutably achieved the status of a contemporary classic. Favorably comparing his work to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger, The New York Times describes it as the “voice of a generation.”
His numerous novels and short stories have won praise and awards from all quarters as have his columns and articles in publications including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Corriera della Serra, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal. Jay also writes a monthly wine column for Town & Country Magazine.
Further straddling genres, McInerney wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed film Gia for as well as the1988 United Artists film version of his novel, Bright Lights, Big City. Jay currently lives and works between Bridgehampton, New York, and New York City.
Mick Herron
Mick Herron is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Slough House thrillers, which have won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award, two CWA Daggers, been published in 20 languages, and are the basis of a major TV series starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. He is also the author of the Zoë Boehm series, and the standalone novels Reconstruction and This is What Happened. Mick was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Oxford. His latest novel, The Secret Hours, will appear in September 2023.
Will Smith
Will Smith is a two-time Emmy award and WGA award winning British writer and novelist. He is currently writing and exec-producing See-Saw's adaptation of Mick Herron's SLOW HORSES novels for Apple, starring Gary Oldman. Will also recently executive produced and wrote across two series of Armando Iannucci's HBO comedy series AVENUE 5. Will's latest original work includes a series in development with House Productions and original comedy project in development with HBO (which he has co-written with Marina Hyde). Previously, Will wrote across all six seasons of the political comedy series VEEP which won him two consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Comedy Series and was also a co-executive producer on the show. His other extensive television credits include being a part of the core writing teams on THE THICK OF IT (in which he also appeared as an actor) and TIME TRUMPET, co-writing two series of DAMNED for Channel 4 with Morwenna Banks and Jo Brand, and providing additional material on Simon Blackwell's sitcom BACK for Channel 4 starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb. His novel MAINLANDER was published in 2015 and was described by The Independent as “John le Carre meets Middlemarch."
Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She teaches at Bard College and is a visiting professor at Harvard University.
Frank Wynne
Frank Wynne is an Irish literary translator, writer and editor. He has translated numerous French and Hispanic authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas and Virginie Despentes. Over a career spanning more than twenty years, his work has earned him the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and he has twice been awarded both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán. Most recently, his translation of Animalia by Jean-Baptiste del Amo won the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize. He has edited two major anthologies, Found in Translation: 100 0f the finest short stories ever translated (2018) and QUEER: LGBT writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday (2021). Most recently, his translation of “The Art of Losing” won the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. Frank was chair of the jury for the 2022 International Booker Prize.
Tamzin Merchant
Tamzin Merchant grew up in Australia, South Africa and Dubai before moving to England in her early teens, where she finally discovered the season of winter.
She has been an actor since the age of 17, when she played the part of Georgiana Darcy in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Since then, her acting work has taken her around the world and on a journey through time. She has been a Tudor, a Victorian and a Jacobean. She survived the Blitz in 1940 and succumbed to pneumonia in Edwardian times. She's been an alien, a witch, a doomed Queen and a rebel Scottish warrior. She has also written and directed several award-winning short films. Her latest role is as Imogen Spurnrose in Amazon's original series, Carnival Row.
Tamzin is the bestselling author of The Hatmakers and The Mapmakers.
Kyra Dupont Troubetzkoy
Born in 1971 in Geneva, Kyra Dupont Troubetzkoy obtained a double master's degree with honour in international relations (The Graduate Institute) and journalism (City University). Her interest in environmental and humanitarian causes led her to Cambodia where she started her career as a producer for the correspondent of CNBC Asia. After many collaborations in the written press, radio and television in France, the United States and Switzerland, she became head of the international section of the largest French speaking newspaper of Switzerland. Freelance journalist since 2007, she started writing fiction. Le piège de papier (The paper Trap) published by Éditions Favre in January 2023, is her sixth novel. Kyra is also SG of the NGO J'aime ma planète, involved in environmental education and leads various writing workshops.
Andrea
Marcolongo
Winter WoW 28 January 2023 Author
See link for recording here
Andrea Marcolongo is an Italian writer based in France. She holds a Philology degree from the University of Milan as well as Masters in Storytelling from Scuola Holden in Turin.
Her first book about Ancient Greek, La lingua geniale (Laterza 2016 )/ La langue Geniale (Les Belles Lettres 2018), is an international best-seller translated in more than 28 countries. Her many other publications include: La misura eroica (Mondadori 2018) / La part du héros (Les Belles Lettres 2019); Alla fonte delle parole (Mondadori 2019); Étymologies pour survivre au chaos (Les Belles Lettres 2020); La lezione di Enea (Laterza, 2020). Her last book is L’art de resister (Gallimard 2021).
She regularly reviews books of foreign literature for the weekly insert Tuttolibri by La Stampa and collaborates with various French newspapers such as Le Figaro. She is a Jury Member for the Prix du Livre d’Histoire des Outres-Mer and for the Prix Le Grand Continent.