Biography

Born in 1957, Emmanuel Carrère is committed to exploring new literary territories, on the border between types of fantasy and the news . A graduate of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, he is also a writer and director.

Bravoure (1984 - 1984 Prix Passion and Prix de la Vocation 1985), he directed Frankenstein and establishes the rules of a strange literary game.

He continues like this, between reality and nightmare, with La Moustache (1986-Grand Prix 1987 in science fiction) where a harmless razor cut leads the hero to the tragic recovery of his identity and with the Le Détroit de Behring (1987), essay on "alternate history" that rewrites history in the conditional, while the "singeing of" Hors d’atteinte? (1988), tumbles into the irreplaceable.

In 1993, he choses to devote a biography to the master of science fiction, Philip K. Dick, I am alive and you're dead (1993). The two writers have in common an imaginative work that expresses a permanent shadow over reality.

In 1995, Emmanuel Carrère publishes La classe de neige (Prix Femina), a scary little suspence novel, in which the protagonist, who lives in his imagination, announces that of L'Aderversaire (2000).

This novel portrays Jean-Claude Romand who murdered his family in 1993 after living a lie for eighteen years.

La classe de neige and L'Adversaire cover the themes dear to the work of Emmanuel Carrère: silence, lying, mental imbalance.

After seven years of silence, the novelist chooses to trace the sources of family history to exorcise old ghosts. In un roman Russe (2007), he "deliberately violates the orders of his mother, as he reveals all what she wants to hide. Everything is played in this tension . This is one of the highlights of the novel: the mother is never there but we feel her presence over the shoulder of the writer.» (Florence Noiville, Le Monde des livres, March 2nd, 2007)

D'autres vies que la mienne (March 2009), Carrère has sought to tell historical facts and raises the question of truth in literature.

"Admittedly, empathy, Carrere's curiosity, concise and brutal, his discipline of narrative, his willingness to enter into the lives of others, his taste for the dark individual confessions result in a remarkable book. Hard and black as a blueprint." (Jacques-Pierre Amette, Le Point, March 12th, 2009)

"Novelist of madness, autobiographer of neurosis, painter of the darkness, the author of La Moustache and La classe de neige abdicates here for the first time, his natural defenses, his bad feelings, his egotism, his self-loathing, his attraction to psychopaths and games of massacre. And he praises,with a few exemplary lives, virtues that were not in his vocabulary: courage in the face of adversity, dignity in illness, fidelity to the ideals of the left, the justice serving the poorest and "passionate love" (Jerome Garcin, Le Nouvel Observateur, March 5th, 2009)