Yann Apperry, 2010-2011

Yann Apperry was the recipient of the Randell Cottage Writers’ Residency for 2010-2011. He arrived in New Zealand on the 23 October 2010 and left at the end of March 2011. During his six-month stint in Aotearoa he worked on his next novel.

Yann Apperry was born in 1972 to a French father and an American mother. He is based in Berlin and France. His first book Qui vive was published by Les Éditions de Minuit, and then by Grasset as was his novel Paradoxe du ciel nocturne. Apperry’s book Diabolus in Musica, published in 2000, won the Prix Médicis. His following novel, Farrago (2003), was awarded the Lycéens Goncourt Prize. In 2008, Terre Sans Maître was published. In the same year, L’Île aux histoires, the first volume in a series of children’s books that Apperry co-wrote with Tanja Siren, was published.

The artist also writes for the theatre. His play Les hommes sans aveux, published by Actes Sud, was performed in 2000 at the Théâtre du Gymnase and the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris. His following plays Mercure Apocryphe and Je dirai ceci d’obscur were performed the following year at the Petit Odéon. What’s more, Apperry writes songs and libretti - often with the help of Claude Barthélémy, Massimo Nunzi and Régis Huby. He and Régis Huby created Abalone Productions in 2007. The same year, he and Claude Barthélémy wrote a play entitled Bruit Blanc which was recorded in 2008 by the French national radio station, France Culture - the same station for which Apperry and Massimo Nunzi wrote Les sentimentales Funérailles in 2001. This was awarded the Prix Gilson for “Best French Fiction Radio-Play”.

Apperry co-wrote the screenplay for Jalil Lespert’s first movie : 24 Mesures which was released in 2007. Yann Apperry is currently working on an opera, entitled Turing’s Tuned Dances with Claude Barthélemy and the choreographer Dominique Rebaud. Apperry is also one of the founding members of Groupe Ouest, an organisation committed to supporting and producing films shot in Brittany.

Apperry is the winner of an Hachette Foundation scholarship, and has previously been a resident at the Villa Medici and at the Villa Kujoyama in Japan.

Nikki MacDonald of The Dominion Post interviews Yann Apperry

(PDF - 5.4 Mo)