Anne Françoise Garréta is a French novelist and a member of the experimental literary group Oulipo. She is the first member of Oulipo to be born after the group's founding. Her awards include the Prix Médicis.

Life and career

Early life and academic career

Anne Garréta was born in 1962 in Paris. In 1982 she graduated from the École normale supérieure. She was a professor of literature from the 17th and 18th centuries at the University of Princeton before being appointed ''maître de conférences'' at the University of Rennes 2 in 1995. She is currently teaching at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies.

Oulipo

Garréta met Oulipian writer Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994, and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won the Prix Médicis in 2002 for her novel ''Pas un jour''. /sup> awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent" (she is the second Oulipian to win the award— Georges Perec won in 1978). Garréta has also contributed to ''La Bibliothèque oulipienne'', a collection of short texts written by members of Oulipo. Garréta wrote two texts for this collection: ''N-amor'' (2007) and ''Tu te souviens… ?'' (with Valérie Beaudouin, 2007).

Writing career

Garréta's first novel, ''Sphinx'' (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator's love interest, A***. Published when the author was twenty-three years old, ''Sphinx'' is the first novel by a female member of Oulipo to be translated to English. Her second novel, ''Ciels liquides'' (Grasset, 1990), tells the fate of a character losing the use of language. In ''La Décomposition'' (Grasset, 1999), a serial killer methodically murders characters from

Marcel Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel ''In Search of Lost Time'' (''À la recherche du temps perdu''; with the previous Eng ...

's In Search of Lost Time. In her book ''Not One Day'' she is “recollecting one woman whom she’s desired or who has desired her” every day for a month.

Awards

* Prix Médicis (2002) for the novel ''Pas un jour''

Works

* ''Sphinx'' (Grasset, 1986); English translation by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum, 2015) * ''Pour en finir avec le genre humain'' (Editions François Bourin, 1987) * ''Ciels liquides'' (Grasset, 1990) * ''La Décomposition'' (Grasset, 1999) * ''Pas un jour'' (Grasset, 2002); English translation by Emma Ramadan, "Not One Day" (Deep Vellum, 2017). Spanish translation by Sara Martin Menduiña. "Ni un dia" (EDA Libros, 2017) * ''Éros Mélancolique'' (with Jacques Roubaud) (Grasset, 2009) * ''Dans l'beton'' (Grasset, 2017); English translation by Emma Ramadan, "In Concrete" (Deep Vellum 2021)

References

External links

An extract from the English Translation of SphinxAnother extract from the English translation of Sphinx
{{DEFAULTSORT:Garreta, Anne F. French women writers Oulipo members Prix Médicis winners 1962 births Living people Academic staff of Rennes 2 University Writers from Paris Place of birth missing (living people)