Michaël Ferrier, Transnational Novelist: French Without Borders

Michaël Ferrier is a prize-winning novelist, essayist and academic whose cosmopolitan life - he grew up in Chad and France, has Mauritian roots and lives in Japan - has inspired him to write some fascinating novels that cross generic and geographical boundaries. This book is the first ever monograph dedicated to his works, which explore themes as various as an African childhood, notions of Frenchness, inter-identities, and post-Fukushima life in Japan. Hybridity is key to his themes, forms and genres, which include - as befits a twenty-first century author - a website, called ’Tokyo-Time-Table’ and discussed in this study. Kawakami uses an eclectic range of frameworks to analyse Ferrier’s output, ranging from translingualism to Environmental Humanities and Ferrier’s own vision of his oeuvre, which he discloses for the first time in this book in the interview that he grants Kawakami. This interview, first published in this volume, is rich in insights into Ferrier’s views on dreams, Japan, the internet, and collaborating with other artists. This book is an indispensable guide to an author who is one of the rising stars of contemporary French and Francophone literature, and a unique voice that crosses all kinds of borders across the globe.

Akane Kawakami is Senior Lecturer in French Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. She has written numerous articles on modern and contemporary French and Francophone literature, and is the author of A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); Travellers’ Visions: French Literary Encounters with Japan, 1881-2004 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005); and Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux and Macé (Oxford: Legenda, 2013). She has also published two books of essays in Japanese, introducing aspects of English culture to a Japanese readership.