for english readers
Emmanuelle Pagano was born in Aveyron in september 1969. She lives today in Ardèche, with three children, born in april 1991, september 1995 and may 2003. She graduated in Fine Arts, and has done university researches in the field of esthetics in the cinema as well as the multimedia. Fellow at Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome, april 2013 – august 2014.
(also in worldwhoswho)
"Night-Light", short story, feb 2013, read.
The cancellation, a short story in the exhibation catalogue of FACE—Investigations of a Dog Works from Five European Art Foundations.
European Prize for emerging talents in the field of contemporary fiction : see the interview and Events at a glance.
Novels
Les Mains gamines (Childish Hands) : Read a presentation and the first pages in english (translation by Marjolin De Jager)
Les Adolescents troglodytes (The Cave teenagers)
Adèle is a schoolbus driver, on a far and isolated high plateau. She drives a dozen of children and teenagers, mostly brothers and sisters, and whose stories mix with hers. As she drives through tough weather, her memories and her thoughts glide on those lost roads, meanwhile the young and the small ones mostly argue and sometimes keep quiet. She remembers her unfit body, the one of her own painful adolescence. Adèle is a girl born in a boy’s body. Neither the old ones nor the small young ones know about her past. She was born on the very plateau, in its middle, in the “farmhouse of the bottom”, as they used to call it, today drown under the lake’s water, from the dam. She lived there with her parents and her brother, Axel, but one day she left, and then came back in her new body: no one has recognized her.
She drives her life and the schoolbus between the artificial lake, which covers her childhood, and an other lake, natural and volcanic, where she likes to pause. She thinks of her brother, Axel. He has never accepted the womanhood of his older one. Axel works on ropes, he is consolidating the cliffs that hold the plateau. He refuses to see her, to even speak to her. One day a rock collapses, and Axel gets only wounded with a broken finger, but something in him has given in. Adèle goes to town to visit him, and they talk with one another again.
One afternoon, back from school, the blizzard and snowdrifts blur the road out, Adèle and her teenagers are lost. They take shelter for the night in a cave near the lake.
Le Tiroir à cheveux (The Locks in the drawer)
One should never speak about my neighbor, not even in her back. One should not talk to her either. She had not asked permission to fall pregnant. Actually for most things she would not wait for the permission to be granted. I think that she jumped over the gate, when she still did not have the right to the key. I would not have done so myself, but I would hide to write, because I was never too sure it was permitted. I was looking at my neighbor’s son, all crooked in his stroller, his eyes catching the full sun, and I was wondering what did not grant him the right to move, to see, to hear, to speak, to raise a hand to wipe his mouth. I was watching his mother and I was admiring her on the sly. I was admiring her for having done that, a forbiden child, drooling and hogging the sky to himself. I was ashamed also, the poor one. I have written down this story without permission, not even his, let alone his mother’s, just to tell her, way too late, your son looks handsome, as I was passing down the courtyard, and opening the gate in front of her.
Pas devant les gens (Not in front of everyone)
When I was only little, I oftentimes slept in my parents bed, between them. I would take an arm, a leg, I would not care who it belonged to, I would just take a part of them and I would fall asleep. Half asleep, I would sometimes softly breath in my mother’s hair. Her hair would move slightly, in my soft night wind, when I would laugh in my sleep. My mother would carelessly scratch herslef. But nothing would tear nor break. When my father and my mother would sleep so tight, as to leaving me no room to fit between them, I would crawl down to the bottom of the bed, and remain under the sheets, my head in their feet, my mouth against a leg. My parents would let me do that.
Something like sleeping is pressing against my eyelids, but my eyes aren’t shut. I feel like sleeping, I feel like weeping. I am thinking of my mother, the way she would cry for days, without being sad, just by nature. Her tears would dry out, and leave their perfume on her face. There was no reason for those tears, that was just something that could not be explained, in fact it was the beginning of things for her.
Pour Être chez moi (I would prefer to stay home)
She has climbed to the high plateau, a child at each hand, towards winter, the silence of the snow, and she has followed the somber tracks of the ravens. A loner, without the men with whom she never was in love. Nowadays, she invents herself love stories with body parts and images scattered. She goes to bed with just anybody. Afterwards, it is not the men who disapppear, it is her, closing the door behind them and she is gone, never to return.
Articles, short stories and other texts
Contacts
e-mail
Emmanuelle Pagano
Éditions POL
33, rue Saint-André des Arts
75006 Paris / France
For press purposes, Jean-Paul hirsch, POL éditions, same adress.
For rights transfers (for the novels) please contact Videke Madsen (madsen[@]pol-editeur.fr)
Texts, photos, films and audio, all rights reserved.
