Eighteen established writers, one from each city/region, were commissioned to write a chapter in a response to their Arts & Society theme within the context of their city.
Just as Ulysses is innovative in its form and language, so the writers were chosen with a view to reflecting a breadth of genres, styles and innovations. All the (new) chapters from the 18 cities/regions will be brought together in a book to be published in the Autumn 2024: ULYSSES European Odyssey.
Valérie Manteau wrote the Marseille chapter.
Writer’s Statement
Blending the rigour of documentary work and the freedom that fiction gives, in particular applied to hijacking elements of my own life, my books straddle several genres and strive to weave together, in narratives most often in the first person, all the event states of “great history” (from the 2015 attacks in France, from the failed coup d’état of 2016 in Turkey, or mobilisations for housing in Marseille, or for democracy in the Congo, etc.) mixing the most impersonal, public, collective, to the most intimate, singular, traumatic, conscious and unconscious. Close to the body, listening to somatic manifestations, dreams, significant coincidences, but also political and historical dynamics, my writing seeks to recapture the lived experience in all its complexity, including that of it which is incomprehensible, opaque, and ineffable.
Writer’s Biography
Valérie Manteau was born in Paris in 1985. She is a writer, publisher and journalist. She studied French literature in Paris and Montreal. A reader of Aimé Césaire, reflecting on the relationship between literature and politics, she worked as an editor at Les Échappés-Charlie Hebdo from 2008 to 2013, before joining the Mucem team (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations) from 2013 to 2018.
She is the author of two novels: Calme et Tranquille (2016, Le Tripode) which describes the eruption of violence in the daily life of a young woman; and Le Sillon (2018, Le Tripode), a stroll through Istanbul in the footsteps of a Turkish lover and a murdered Armenian journalist, for which she received the Renaudot Prize and the Armenia News Trophy in 2018. Le Sillon has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Armenian.
Manteau works with citizen collectives on the issues of unfit housing and local democracy, while keeping an eye on the issues of freedom of expression and human rights in Turkey. She writes in the press on these subjects. Since 2020, at the invitation of the national centre of creation for works in public spaces, Lieux Publics, she has been developing a series on Marseille entitled Chroniques d’une ville éphémère, illustrated by graphic designer, Stephan Muntaner and broadcast by Radio Grenouille. She lives in Marseille.