Oct.21,2013
On the morning of October 16th, Olivier Rolin, the famous French writer who was awarded Prix Fémina, paid a visit to the Institute of French Language & Culture (IFLC), SIS, and shared his stories with the students and teachers.
Olivier Rolin first introduced himself and explained why he works on writing. Born in 1947, he graduated from École Normale Supérieure in Literature and obtained master degree of Philosophy. He was once a publisher and a reporter. In his twenties, he took active part in the May 1968 events in France. As a witness and participator, he held a profound understanding of French society and his own behavior in the event. It is the cognition and introspection that made up his inspirational spring of the premier works.
For this French “experienced revolutionist”, even though the year of 1968 has been a past memory, his enthusiasm of literature never reduced. Not as some other high-producing writers who publish books one after another, he makes a careful consideration for his every single book, which even takes him 3-5 years to finish. Since he started to write 30 years ago, he has published 3 travel notes and 14 novels, which brought him a lot of honor and high praise in French society.
As for literature, Olivier Rolin would like to treat it seriously and delve it calmly in a tradition way. He wants the stream of thoughts to flow under the words and believes that both the accumulation of words and the exploration of language are conducive to the sublimation of thoughts. At the lecture, He recommended some of his enlightened reading materials with a hope that these books can open the door of literature for the students.
Students were interested in his revolutionary career as well as his former identity of reporter and asked a series of questions, which were explained one after another by Olivier Rolin patiently.
After an hour and a half, the lecture was over, while all of the students were still longing for more. Olivier Rolin’s legendary life experience deeply attracted everyone.
The representative works of Olivier Rolin include Phénomène futur, Tigre en papier, Port-Soudan, L'invention du monde and so on. Among them, Port-Soudan won Prix Fémina in 1994. Tigre en papier won Prix Louis Guilloux in 2003, Prix France Culture in 2003 and Prix Ciné roman in 2004. It was translated into Chinese and published in 2012.
(Translated by LEI Jialin)
