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How to pronounce Maylis De Kerangal: my-LEECE dee CARE-en-gal (second part of the first name rhymes with "fleece")
Maylis de Kerangal is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including Naissance d'un pont (Birth of a Bridge), winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; Réparer les vivants, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and whose English translation, The Heart, was one of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and the winner of the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Mend the Living was Longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2016.
This bio was last updated on 10/27/2024. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
Canoes are one of many motifs that appear in all of these stories. What inspired this decision?
Canoes can contain narrative. It's a nod to Ursula K. Le Guin's "carrier bag" of fiction. I see the canoe as a basket going through each part of my imagination and memories, collecting the stories. And they were a means of communication for the First Nations in North America, who used them to go from village to village. It's quite a magical object with a totemic poetic notion.
A character in "Nevermore" hires the narrator to read a poem and instructs her to "climb inside the text as you would through a half-open window." Did you have this image in mind when writing these stories?
I wrote each story thinking about the others. They are all connected. For me, it's a novel cut in different fragments rather than a collection. I call it a "novel in detached pieces." And there are women's voices in all these stories: the parts speak to each other.
Strong voices are central to Canoes. Tell us more about where these voices come from.
The voice of the text is an enigmatic thing, and it's very important to me. When we're reading, we hear a voice, and it's not the author's or our own. We hear another voice. Voices can tell of what we...
André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, Enigma Variations, and Find Me. He's the editor of The Proust Project... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Canoes
Try:
Room on the Sea
by Andre Aciman
Tessa Hadley is the author of three previous collections of stories and eight novels. She was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and has been a finalist ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Canoes
Try:
After the Funeral and Other Stories
by Tessa Hadley
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