La Grande Vie

It was with Fata Morgana that Christian Bobin published his first pamphlets: Souveraineté du vide (1985), L’Homme du désastre (1986) and Lettres d’or (1987), before Gallimard published La Part manquante (1989) and the bestselling Une petite robe de fête (1991) and Le Très-Bas (1992), which established his reputation with the wider public.

An epistolary writer rather than a novelist, given his manner of writing fragments set with confidences and aphorisms, Christian Bobin conceived of his writing as “a work of healing… of suffering life, of life undermined by modern conditions.” Like a Christian ascetic, he sought to “express as well as possible things felt obscurely, … in search of the greatest simplicity,” and to “transmit an emotion that has come to [him], to ensure that this emotion is contagious.”
He received the Prix d’Académie in 2016 for his complete body of work.