‘Alain Damasio & Erri De Luca’

BOZAR is proposing what promises to be a passionate debate between Erri De Luca and Alain Damasio. Although the paths of these two socially engaged writers may be very different, their literary works converge in a shared condemnation of social violence, whether exercised through the social relations of production, inequalities between rich and poor nations, normative control exercised by the State or what Damasio refers to as technocapitalism. Be sure not miss this conversation in which two of the most notable writers of our times will take a critical look at our societies. The conversation will be moderated by Pascal Claude (La Première).

First in Italy and then in France, the political conscience of Erri De Luca led him to join movements of the radical left, to work in a variety of manual jobs and to actively participate in humanitarian actions in Yugoslavia and Africa. Not Now, Not Here, published in 1989, was the first in a long series of successful novels that have won many awards, including the Prix Femina in 2002 for Montedidio, and the European Prize for Literature in 2013 and the André Malraux Prize for Political Fiction in 2020, for Impossible. His latest work of poetry, published in French by Gallimard, Aller simple suivi de L'hôte impenitent, evokes the tragic saga of migrants. This year he is guest of honour at the Brussels Book Fair.

When he first started writing, his plan was to take the opposite view to Orwell. Yet there is something undeniably Orwellian in the futuristic literature of Alain Damasio. This is certainly true for his first book, La Zone du Dehors [The Outside Zone] (1999), which deals with societies under control within the democratic model. His works have since met with much acclaim and won numerous awards. La Horde du Contrevent [The Windwalkers], Les furtifs [The Stealthies] and Self-Made-Man? Ou la créativité discutable de Nolan Peskine published in Au bal des actifs. Demain le travail, were winners, respectively, of Le Grand prix de l'Imaginaire (French award for speculative fiction) in 2006 and 2020 in the “francophone novel” category and in 2018 in the “new francophone” category. With Les furtifs he joined the very select group of writers who appeal both to readers of science fiction and of mainstream literature. Continuing his condemnation of the way technology creates alienation and curtails freedom, his latest work Scarlett et Novak, for young readers, has just been published by Rageot.