Presentation

 ***Winner of the 2009 Prix Femina***
***Shortlisted for 2009 Prix Medicis***
***Shortlisted for 2009 Prix  de l'Académie française***
***Translation sample available***

     No One is an alphabetical portrait from twenty-six different angles, but with an empty centre. It is the portrait of a man without a self, a melancholic, or, in harsher, less literary terms, a manic-depressive. As the rough terrain of his inner landscape takes shape, letter by letter, the «me» who emerges proves more of an «us» or a «them». From «A» for «Antonin Artaud» through «Z» for «Zelig», via «C» for «Clown» or «K» for «Kabyl», we are witness to a procession of doubles, a people of masks contained by a single man. But No One is also an ABC of memory and the lost presence of childhood, the mask through which a living writer seeks to give voice to her dead father, and literature gives expression to madness.


     A novelist and a philosopher, Gwenaëlle Aubry  studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Trinity College in Cambridge. She published her first novel, Le diable détacheur (Actes Sud), in 1999, followed in 2002 and 2003 by L’Isolée (Stock) et L'Isolement (Stock) and Notre vie s’use en transfigurations (Actes Sud, 2007), written while in residency at the Villa Medicis in Rome. She is also the author of several nonfiction works including a translation of a treatise by Plotinus.
In 2009, she won the Prix Femina for Personne (No One).