Laurence Plazenet, Special Jury Mention
A scholar of seventeenth-century literature and a novelist
A graduate of the École normale supérieure and an honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France, Laurence Plazenet taught for many years as a lecturer at Université Paris-Sorbonne. Since 2017, she has been professor of seventeenth-century French literature at Université Clermont Auvergne. She is a member of the CNRS National Committee (section 38), director of the Centre international Blaise Pascal (IHRIM, UMR 5317), and president of the Société des Amis de Port-Royal. She also edits the Courrier Blaise Pascal and the series “Univers Port-Royal” at Classiques Garnier.
Her research focuses on the reception of the ancient Greek novel in France and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, narrative fiction between 1550 and 1700, Port-Royal, literary Augustinianism, La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Lafayette, Racine, and Pascal.
Alongside her academic career, Laurence Plazenet has never given up writing fiction, her first vocation since childhood. She has published three novels with Albin Michel and Gallimard: L’amour seul (2005), La Blessure et la soif (2009), and Disproportion de l’homme (2010). L’amour seul has been translated into seventeen languages. In 2012, she received the European Union Prize for Literature.
She has also written a play adapted from La Blessure et la soif, which premiered in 2024 at the Théâtre Marigny with Fanny Ardant, directed by Catherine Schaub, with an original score by Armand Amar. Two more plays are forthcoming: La Dernière nuit du temps and Amour, ou la véritable histoire d’Orphée et Eurydice.
Her residency project: Styx ou la séparation du monde
Laurence Plazenet has begun writing a novel titled Styx ou la séparation du monde (Styx, or the Separation from the World), set between Paris and the United States.
The story explores the relationship between Jorge and his sister Alma and belongs to the tradition of sibling love, which it seeks to renew through its geographical setting, its contemporary time frame, and the age of its protagonists, both nearing fifty.
Marked by their past, by what they lived through or tried to escape, Jorge and Alma have built separate worlds. A musician, Jorge is the organist of Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. Alma chose the world of vintage photography in the United States, which she trades within a small circle of recognized specialists. She advises the museums that will house the collections and objects she helps bring to light. A leading figure among those whose discoveries shape their contemporaries’ memory and sense of history, she is about to open a gallery when she loses her sight and, with it, access to the only window onto light she had left.
No one knows yet when, by chance, she runs into Jorge in Paris, for the first time in years. Jorge then decides to become his sister’s eyes. For ten months, he sees for her and through her. From image to image, he searches for her trace. Having traded sound for fragments of silence, he listens for their echoes in Alma. He tries to tear her away from her night and dreams of a night transfigured.
Through this story, Styx ou la séparation du monde explores family ties, memory, perception, and the power of images, while exploring the possibility of rebuilding after loss.
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