Pascal Quignard

Fascinated from a very young age by silence and muteness, Pascal Quignard found in writing a way to express himself while remaining quiet. His first essay, L'Être du balbutiement (The Being of Stammering), published in 1969, already betrayed his obsession with language, its sources, and the conditions of its apparition. Fragmented writings, biographies, novels, essays, fairy tales, treatises... his works take various forms but all are inhabited by music, from Carus, a novel published in 1980, to the ninth volume of Last KingdomMourir de penser (To Die of Thinking), published in 2014. Although he has been writing for Marie Vialle's shows since 2003, Pascal Quignard, who won the Prix Goncourt in 2002, didn't set foot onstage until 2011, for a butoh adaptation of Medea. Now addicted to stage fright and to the unpredictability of the theatre, he seems to have resolved never to leave the stage again.

Portrait of Pascal Quignard © Richard Schroeder