Occupation Writer Language French | Name Edouard Louis Role Writer | |
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Born Eddy Bellegueule
October 10, 1992 (age 31)
Picardie, France ( 1992-10-10 ) Genre Novel, drama; Non-Fiction, Sociology Books En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule Nominations Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman | ||
Edouard louis dubufe 1820 1883 french painter
Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule; October 30, 1992) is a French writer.
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Edouard louis dubufe
Biography
Édouard Louis, born Eddy Bellegueule was born and raised in the town of Hallencourt in the North of France, which is the setting of his first novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (published in English as The End of Eddy).
Louis grew-up in a poor family supported by government welfare: his father was a factory worker for a decade until "a weight fell on him and destroyed his back" and he became unemployed; his mother found occasional work bathing the elderly. The poverty, racism and alcoholism which confronted him during his childhood would become the subject of his literary work.
He is the first in his family to attend university, and in 2011 he was admitted to École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 2013, he officially changed his name to Édouard Louis.
The same year, he edited the collective work, Pierre Bourdieu. L'insoumission en héritage, which analyses the influence of Pierre Bourdieu on critical thinking and political emancipation.
In 2014 he published En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, an autobiographical novel. The book was the subject of extensive media attention and was hailed for its literary merit and compelling story. The book also gave rise to debate and controversy over the perception of the working class. It was a bestseller in France and has been translated to over 20 languages.
In September 2015, Edouard Louis penned a Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive alongside philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. In the letter, which ran on the front page of Le Monde, and was later reprinted in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Louis and Lagasnerie denounce the legitimization of right-wing agendas in public discourse and establish principals by which leftist intellectuals should reengage in public debate.
In 2016, Louis published his second novel, History of Violence. In recounting the story of his rape and attempted murder on Christmas Eve of 2012, the autobiographical novel centers around the cyclical and self-perpetuating nature of violence in society.
Style and Influences
The work of Édouard Louis maintains a fine link with sociology: the presence of Pierre Bourdieu pervades his novels which invoke the themes of social exclusion, domination, and poverty. The influence of William Faulkner is also revealed through Louis' superposition in the same sentence of various levels of language – placing the popular vernacular at the heart of his writing. Furthermore, Louis' novel Histoire de la Violence contains an essay on Faulker's novel Sanctuary. The author says that by working languages, he wants to use violence as a literary subject, "I want to make violence a literary space, like Marguerite Duras made a literary space of madness or as Claude Simon made war into a literary space."
The greatest contemporary influence on Louis comes from French sociologist Didier Eribon, whose book "Returning to Reims" Louis says, "marked a turning point for his future as a writer." He has also included James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir amongst "the writers who have meant the most to me".