Who are the guest writers at
KOLKATA LITERARY FESTIVAL FRENCH FOCUS?
Please find below the list.

Annie Terrier

After studying sociology, Annie Terrier has taught body and oral language for seventeen years. In 1983, she created the association Les Ecritures croisées in Aix-en-Provence.
Les Ecritures croisées organize series of literary encounters all year long, including La Fête du Livre, which has seen prominent authors, poets, artists and publishers : from all around the world : John Coetze, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy to name a few… La Fête du Livre allows all forms of arts to meet and merge: literature meets photography, painting, music, theatre.

Annie Terrier is Knight of the Ordre National du Mérite and Officer in the Ordre des Arts et Lettres.

Christian Garçin

Christian Garçin, born in 1959, lives near Marseille. He has published many poems, essays, travelogues, children’s books, short stories, novels in addition to a book of photography. He has also translated from Spanish and English into French the works of Jorge-Luis Borges, Charles Bukowski, Edgar Allan Poe, David Kirby, Campbell McGrath to name a few. He received in 2012 the Prix Roland-de-Jouvenel de l’Académie Française for his novel Des femmes disparaissent (« Women disappear »).

His latest works include Les vies multiples de Jeremiah Reynolds (Stock, 2016), Selon Vincent (Actes Sud/Babel, 2017) and Les oiseaux morts de l’Amérique (Actes Sud, 2018).

Sébastien Ortiz

Sébastien Ortiz was born in France in 1972.
After studies in political science and Chinese, he entered the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1996. From 1999 to 2002, he worked as Second Secretary at the French Embassy in Indonesia. In September 2002, he published his first novel, Tâleb. The book was very well received both by the critics and the public. It was shortlisted for about ten book awards, including the famous Médicis and Femina prizes. Sébastien Ortiz published his second novel, Mademoiselle Coeur Solitaire (Miss Lonely Hearts) in 2005. Fantômes à Calcutta (Ghosts in Calcutta, 2009) was his third novel. In 2012, he published “Burmese Portraits – Nineteen Views of the Shwedagon”, some short stories based upon his own experience of Burma, where he lived from 2008 to 2012 and worked as Cooperation and Cultural Counsellor at the Embassy of France and director of the French Institute of Myanmar. In 2017, he released “In a Zen temple” based upon his experience in a Buddhist monastery when he was 20. His books were translated in five different countries. He also edited one essay on Bali (“The Taste of Bali”, 2005). He participated in a collective anthology of prefaces (“Irrational collection of prefaces to fetish books”, 2009), two collections of texts on jazz (“My Favourite Things – Around the Jazz in 80 Writers”, 2013 ; “Letters to Miles”, 2016) and an anthology of travel writers (“Babel”, 2013).

From 2012 until 2015, Sébastien Ortiz lived in India and worked as Consul General of France in Calcutta. He now lives in a small village in Normandy.

Gérard Meudal

Gérard Meudal is a literary journalist for the French newspapers Libération and Le Monde. He translated into French the works of Joseph O’Connor, Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie and Paul Auster. He organizes and moderates literary encounters in France.

Jean-Claude Perrier

Jean-Claude Perrier was born in 1957. He is a journalist for literary press and a writer, as well as a traveller, and has devoted several books to India.  About Gide’s work and life, he wrote André Gide ou la tentation nomade (Flammarion 2011).  As an editor, he made possible to read two books that had remained unpublished: Le Ramier (Gallimard, 2002), and parts Gide translated of Kabir’s poetry (La Flûte de l’Infini, Poésie/Gallimard, 2012).

Katia Légeret

Katia Légeret is currently Professor of Performing Arts Aesthetics in the Department of Theatre at University Paris 8. She is also co-director at Paris 8 of the Master in International Artistic Cooperation, and of the European Erasmus Mundus Master in Performing Arts Studies, led by ULB Brussels and involving several European universities. She is particularly interested in the aesthetics of Indian dance and theatre with regard to traditional and modern aspects, this theatre’s influence on European directors and how it is staged theatrically in contemporary France and Europe.

Since her adolescence, and in parallel with her studies, Katia Légeret aka Manochhaya has pursued professional training in Bharata-natyam (dance/theatre of South India). Her training began in France with Amala Devi (a disciple of Ram Gopal) in the Dance Studies courses of the Sorbonne from 1979-1981. As a choreographer and director, Manochhaya-Katia Légeret has composed several performances as Dance-Poem (Paris, Menagerie de verre, 1998), Shiva Rodin (Paris, Musée Rodin/La Reine blanche, 2012), Panchatantra and La Fontaine (Université Paris 8, 2014), Mysore Stutis (Musée MNAAG-Guimet, Paris, 2016), La Porte de l’Enfer de Rodin, and Joyaux Moghols (Grand Palais, Paris, 2017).

She is the author of Rodin and The Dance of Shiva, (Dir.), Niyogi Books, New Delhi, Inde, 2016.

Philippe Forest

Philippe Forest was born in 1962. Docteur ès Lettres, he has taught at several universities in the UK. Since 1995, he has been a professor of literature at the Université de Nantes. Most of his works have been published by Éditions Gallimard, including L’Enfant éternel, Prix Femina du premier roman (1997), Sarinagara, Prix Décembre (2004), Le Nouvel Amour (2007), Tous les enfants sauf un (2007), Le siècle des nuages (2010), Le chat de Schrödinger (2013), and Crue (2016).

Sabine Wespieser

Sabine Wespieser, born in 1961, taught classic literature in eastern France before joining Actes Sud in 1987. It is here that she created the paperback imprint, Babel before becoming a publisher for the same. In 2000, she joined the imprint Librio at Flammarion. where she developed essays and literary anthologies.

She created her own publishing house in 2001. Sabine Wespieser Éditeur is an independent structure, publishing about 10 titles a year of French and foreign literary fiction. Sabine Wespieser focuses on building a coherent catalogue with a strong attachment to her authors, Vincent Borel, Duong Thu Huong,  Yanick Lahens, Michèle Lesbre, Diane Meur, Nuala 0’Faolain, Léonor de Récondo to name a few.

Sabine Wespieser Éditeur received Prix Femina in 2006 for L’Histoire de Chicago May by Nuala O’Faolain, and again in 2014 for Bain de Lune by Yanick Lahens.

Shumona SINHA

Shumona SINHA, born in Calcutta, 1973, is a French author who lives in Paris. She has a M.Phil degree in French linguistics and literature from Sorbonne University and tought English and French in high-schools in Parisian region for 14 years. Her harsh, but multilayered poetical literary reckoning with France’s asylum system, made her famous overnight. She published her first novel Fenêtre sur l’abîme in 2008 (Éditions de la Différence). Her second novel, published in 2011 by Éditions de l’Olivier and to be published in English by Social Science Press in 2018, was highly acclaimed by the critics. In her third novel, published in January 2014 by Éditions de l’Olivier, Shumona Sinha goes down the memory lane of a Bengali family to describe the violent political history of West Bengal. The book is rewarded by the Grand Prix du Roman de la Société des Gens de Lettres (2014) et le Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises de L’Académie française (2014).

In her interviews for the French and European media, Shumona Sinha claims that her homeland is no longer India, nor even France, but the French language.

Makenzy Orcel

Born in 1983 (Haiti), Makenzy Orcel is an award-winning novelist and poet.  His first novel Les Immortelles (Zulma, 2012) is a very compelling – and poetic – work of fiction written right after the devastating earthquake of 2010, and for which he received great critical acclaim.

In 2016, he is back with the masterful L’Ombre animale, a literary prowess where the author explores new bounds of language and storytelling.

L’Ombre animale received numerous literary prizes including: Prix Littérature Monde 2016, Prix Louis Guilloux 2016, Prix littéraire des Caraïbes de l’ADELF 2016, Prix Ethiophile 2016.
Other publications include : Le chant des collines (Mémoire d’encrier, 2017), La Nuit des terrasses (La Contre Allée, 2015) and Caverne (La Contre Allée, 2017).