Biography

Anna Gavalda (born December 9, 1970 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine) is a French teacher and award-winning novelist.

Referred to by Voici magazine as "a distant descendant of Dorothy Parker", Anna Gavalda was born in an upper-class suburb of Paris. While working as French teacher in high school, a collection of her short stories was first published in 1999 under the title "Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part" that met with both critical acclaim and commercial success, selling more than three-quarters of a million copies in her native France and winning the 2000 "Grand Prix RTL-Lire." The book was translated into numerous languages including in English and sold in twenty-seven countries. It was published to acclaim in North America in 2003 as "I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere." The book received much praise and is a library and school selection worldwide in several languages.

Gavalda's first novel, Je L'Aimais (Someone I Loved) was published in France in February of 2002 and later that year in English. Inspired by the failure of her own marriage, it too was a major literary success and a bestseller and was followed by the short (96 pages) juvenile novel 35 kilos d'espoir (95 Pounds of Hope) that she said she wrote "to pay tribute to those of my students who were dunces in school but otherwise fantastic people. "

In 2004, her third novel, "Ensemble c'est tout," focused on the lives of four persons living in an apartment house: a struggling young artist who works as an office cleaner at night, a young aristocrat misfit, a cook, and an elderly grandmother. The 600 page book is a bestseller in France and has been translated into English as Hunting and Gathering.

As of 2007, she has sold in France more than 3 millions of her three books. Ensemble c'est tout was made into a successful movie in 2007 by Claude Berri, with Audrey Tautou and Guillaume Canet. The adaptation of her first novel, Je l'aimais, is on filming.

Divorced, and the mother of two, Gavalda lives in the small city of Melun, Seine-et-Marne, about 50 km southeast of Paris. In addition to novel writing, she also contributes to ELLE magazine.


Works in English translation include:
I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere
Someone I loved
Hunting and gathering, 2006
95 Pounds of Hope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Gavalda

The good fairy ANNA GAVALDA has already cast a spell over her french readers, now her best-selling novel About SEX, FOOD and loneliness is to be published here. she talks to KIRSTY LANG KIRSTY LANG. The Sunday Telegraph. London (UK): May 21, 2006. pg. 022

'MEET ME IN THE BRASSERIE TERMINUS OPPOSITE the Gare du Nord. I shall be wearing a beret and carrying a baguette,' read my email from Anna Gavalda, who clearly believes that we British like nothing better than having our stereotypes confirmed. The French do, too, judging by their appetite for Gavalda's writing. Her latest novel, Hunting and Gathering, is a charming optimistic fable about two quintessentially Gallic subjects - food and sex - which has been at the top of the bestseller charts in France since its publication last year. Her only serious competition is The Da Vinci Code.

Gavalda, a slim blonde in her mid-thirties, turns up for our rendezvous without baguette or beret. Dressed casually in pale trousers and crisp cotton shirt, she is refreshingly free of the airs and graces that so often accompany Parisian literary success. She's been a publishing phenomenon in France since 1999, when her first book, a short-story collection about love, sold nearly a million copies. The book was a word-of-mouth hit that had been turned down by all the major publishers before being picked up by the tiny Editions Le Dilettante, with whom she has remained.

Gavalda has been described variously as the new Franoise Sagan or a French Dorothy Parker and, indeed, her books have both wit and a whimsical charm. Le Figaro, a newspaper not known for either quality, described her recently as 'a good fairy who, with her limpid prose, her heartfelt writing and sparkling dialogue, knows how to put the magic into ordinary lives'. In other words, Gavalda's books are a powerful antidote to the burning suburbs and high unemployment that have led thousands of young French people to flee their country.

Hunting and Gathering is about to be made into a film featuring Audrey Tautou, who starred in Amlie, the most successful French- language movie of recent years. Like Amlie, Hunting and Gathering stops at nothing to make the reader feel good. Reading it reminded me of tucking into one of those beautifully constructed little cakes that you see in the windows of elegant French patisseries.

I tell Gavalda that the last French author I interviewed was the nihilistic Michel Houellebecq, whose satires on middle-aged male angst couldn't be a greater contrast to her stories. She rolls her eyes. 'Every time I go abroad, I'm asked about him. How many cigarettes did he smoke during your interview?'

Over oysters and salade Nioise, I ask Gavalda if she is as optimistic as her writing suggests. 'Not at all, I'm a depressive. My first novel was about a marriage breaking up. It was based on my own divorce and it took a lot out of me. This time I wanted to write a love story, something uplifting.'

Around the time of her divorce she went to see the film Black Cat, White Cat, by the veteran Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica. It's a romantic comedy about a small-time gypsy hustler, set against the backdrop of the Bosnian war. 'I came out feeling really good and it made me realise that it's easy to make people cry. It's much more difficult to make them feel happy.' Her hero is the young Belfast writer Robert McLiam Wilson. She cites his novel Eureka Street - a humorous tale of love and unlikely friendship in a city divided by sectarian violence - as a powerful influence.

Hunting and Gathering is about four lonely people who end up living together in a grand apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Two of them, Camille, a gamine anorexic, and Franck, a rude chef from the provinces, fall in love. 'I thought there was something romantic about a man whose whole world revolves around food, falling in love with a woman who has lost her appetite.'

Gavalda explained that she wanted to write about love, but also cooking: 'I'm fascinated by that whole world of the restaurant kitchen, but I'm not a cook so I had to do some research.' When she told her publisher that the new novel was about sex and food, he rubbed his hands in glee and said, 'Great for the overseas sales.'

But there is a dark side to Gavalda's Paris. Her four protagonists are lonely, the isolated inhabitants of a city where a quarter of the population live by themselves. Their redemption comes through being thrown together. The French title for the book is Ensemble C'est Tout -Togetherness is Everything. Gavalda is unsure why the English publisher chose Hunting and Gathering, although the blurb on the back comparing her to Melissa Bank, the American author of the bestselling The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, surely supplies a clue.

The book is dedicated to 'Mugette (1919-2003), Body unclaimed', a reference to one of the dozens of old people who died in the Paris heatwave three years ago, when much of the city's population went on holiday, leaving the elderly to fend for themselves. To Gavalda, Mugette is the unknown soldier of France's elderly population. 'There were 66 bodies unclaimed after the heatwave. Their names were printed in the papers. I wanted to reclaim Mugette and show that someone remembered her. I wondered how many years of solitude she must have endured before her death to end up so alone.' In the French paperback edition, Gavalda included Mugette's last name, hoping someone might come forward and claim her, but nobody did.

One of the four characters in Hunting and Gathering is a Mugette. At the beginning of the novel, Franck's grandmother, Paulette, is abandoned by her family in a grim, state-run old- people's home. Eventually, Camille takes pity on her and persuades Franck to let her move in with them. Gavalda says she has had letters from people saying, 'I'm going to keep my elderly relative living at home, now that I've read your book.'

Gavalda, who remains close to her own mother, an artist, now lives in the Paris suburbs with her two young children. I ask whether she would like to have more. 'I would, but, every time I read the news-papers or think what we are doing to our environment, I feel my ovaries shrinking in horror. It would be irresponsible to bring any more human beings into this world.'

She smiles: a pessimist who has written an optimistic novel