| Guest of the ilb 2005
Bernard Friot is considered one of France’s
most renowned authors of children’s and youth literature and describes
himself as an »écrivain public«. Most of all, he is fascinated by, and
constantly in search of, the immediate encounter between reader and
writer. Friot was born close to Chartres in 1951 and has since lived in
many towns in France and Germany. He began his career as a teacher,
before becoming the Director of the Bureau du Livre de Jeunesse in
Frankfurt am Main. Today the author and translator lives in Besançon.
He has published a number of books for children and young people, which
have been highly acclaimed, translated into numerous languages and
adapted for the stage.
Friot’s speciality is short prose, at times serious, ironic and
harsh, at times jolly and full of sensitivity. His »Histoires pressées«
(1988ff; t: Stories in a hurry) are legendary and are considered
classics of French children’s literature – they are stories for busy
people, stories that are like a piece of candy to be either savoured on
the tongue or quickly bitten in half, where the reader must read
between the lines or has to spin the tale’s end himself. In the manner
of Gianni Rodari, Friot’s short stories sometimes even have multiple
endings, as in »Amanda chocolat« (2004; t: Chocolate Amanda).
In recent years, Bernard Friot has turned towards longer forms of
storytelling and has published, alongside novels such as »Folle« (2002;
t: Crazy) or »C’est loin, Valparaiso?« (2004; t: Is it a long way to
Valparaiso?), the gripping young adults' novel »Un autre que moi«
(2003; t: Somebody else, not me), which describes seven days of the
fifteen-year old author’s irksome time at boarding school. Friot
rediscovers the language of his childhood and youth and uses the first
person narrative to tell the tale of the young Bernard, and to describe
the cold atmosphere of the boarding school, his family’s indifference,
his own feelings of exclusion and lack of self-awareness, and the need
for love. Through sparse language, Friot describes a search for
identity full of anguish and existential pain. »Un autre que moi«
received great acclaim from critics and the public and was listed in
the White Ravens Catalogue of the Internationale Jugendbibliothek in
Munich (2004) and in the Sélection du Prix des Lycéens allemands
(2005).
© international literature festival berlin | 
