How do you write without betraying the environment from which you come? Nicolas Mathieu looks back at the birth of his vocation, his daily discipline and the “punches” that literature “allows him to give back to life, which gives us a lot of grief”.
A fascinating dive into the factory and the inner worlds of the little blue boy from the Vosges, who has become one of the rising figures of the contemporary novel, whose anger against “the lies, the falsified everything” remains one of the fuels, and who says with joy that he learned more from watching The Sopranos than from studying Tolstoy.
Born in Épinal in 1978, Nicolas Mathieu is notably the author of Aux animaux la guerre (2014, adapted for television with Alain Tasma), then of Leurs enfants après eux (Actes Sud, 2018), which won him the Goncourt Prize, and of Connemara (Actes Sud, 2022), confirming the critical and public acclaim for his social frescoes.
