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 fascinating novels that cross generic and geographical boundaries. This book is the first ever dedicated to his works, which explore subjects as various as an African childhood, notions of Frenchness, inter-identities, and post-Fukushima life in Japan. Hybridity is key to his choice of themes, forms and genres, which include – as befits a twenty-first century author – a website, Tokyo-Time-Table, which is 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, in order to capture the variety and hybridity of his writing. The study includes an interview between Kawakami and Ferrier, published for the first time in this volume, in which the author discusses themes such as 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.