On march 2nd, 3rd and 4th, Master FICTION’s host will be Vivien Bessières for a masterclass on “youth literature”.
Vivien Bessières
Vivien Bessières was born in Brive-la-Gaillarde in 1981, came down to Toulouse in 1999, went up to Paris in 2005, came back down to Toulouse in 2008, then went up, but less high, to Limoges in 2016, so he will not have to fall too low next time. He is afraid of flying, so he has never gone much further, except a few times, in Spain, when he was at his lowest, or in England, one year when he was very high – but always by train. Anyway, he doesn’t like holidays because he read that Stephen King never took one but wrote every day, so he tries to do the same, even if sometimes he just writes the same sentence for hours on end, like in Shining. Luckily, now he’s a college teacher, he’ll never have to deal with high school students again except through a novel and individually, so everything’s much better – and he still has a whole box of anxiolytics left over to take the plane. Otherwise, he is happy to be done with real life himself (from 0 to 30 years old) and can now devote the rest of his days to telling it indirectly, by embellishing it or making it ugly according to his fantasy. He is very grateful to his daughters for having relieved him of this burden of real life and for having forced him, without his knowledge, to think only of himself.
Critic of the novel, Libération:
https://next.liberation.fr/livres/2019/03/06/amitie-particuliere-en-lycee-hostile_1712098
