Gilles Leroy
* Prix Goncourt 2007 (Alabama Song) *
in conversation with Boyd Tonkin

The Institut français is pleased to welcome author Gilles Leroy, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt 2007, on 31 January to discuss his latest novel Alabama Song (Mercure de France, 2007), and his career to date. He will be in conversation with Boyd Tonkin, arts broadcaster and literary editor of The Independent since 1996.

Gilles Leroy, 49, is author of a dozen novels and assorted other writings. After an early career in journalism, he left Paris in 1996 for the countryside of Perche in Northern France to concentrate full-time on writing. His first novel Habibi was published in 1987 by Editions Michel de Maule. He has since been awarded many literary prizes (Prix Valery-Larbaud, Prix Millepages, Prix Cabourg), and was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2005.

Among his best-known works are L’Amant russe (Mercure de France, 2002), the story of an illicit homosexual love affair between a French student and an older Russian man, set against the backdrop of the USSR under Brezhnev; Grandir (Mercure de France, 2004) which narrates the ups and downs in the life of the adolescent narrator Will and his extended family in 60s France; and the autofiction Champsecret (Mercure de France, 2005), presented as the diary of the writer Gilles Leroy and covering events in his professional and personal life in the run-up to the publication of his latest novel.

Alabama Song is the fictional autobiography of Zelda Sayre, wife of the famed novelist F Scott Fitzgerald. Told in the first person, it retraces her escape, through Fitzgerald, from her ultra-conservative background in the American South, the wild parties of 1920s New York, Paris and the Riviera, her volcanic relationship with her husband and her decades-long battle with mental illness. Praised by the Goncourt jury for its high standard of writing, its ‘style flamboyant’ and its brilliant mix of biographical and imaginary elements, with Alabama Song Leroy can claim to have written his own Great American Novel.