Michal Ferrier, Transnational Novelist: French Without Borders

Michal Ferrier is a prize-winning novelist, essayist and academic whose cosmopolitan life he grew up in Chad and France, has Mauritian roots and lives in Japan has inspired him to write some fascinating novels that cross generic and geographical boundaries. This book is the first ever monograph dedicated to his works, which explore themes as various as an African childhood, notions of Frenchness, inter-identities, and post-Fukushima life in Japan. Hybridity is key to his themes, forms and genres, which include as befits a twenty-first century author a website, called Tokyo-Time-Table and discussed in this study. Kawakami uses an eclectic range of frameworks to analyse Ferriers output, ranging from translingualism to Environmental Humanities and Ferriers own vision of his oeuvre, which he discloses for the first time in this book in the interview that he grants Kawakami. This interview, first published in this volume, is rich in insights into Ferriers views on dreams, Japan, the internet, and collaborating with other artists. This book is an indispensable guide to an author who is one of the rising stars of contemporary French and Francophone literature, and a unique voice that crosses all kinds of borders across the globe.