The Alliance Française de Seattle is delighted to partner with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. again for their literary program Authors on Tour, which collaborating with universities, libraries, bookstores, publishing houses, and other venues across the United States to organize events with visiting authors.
On April 18, AFSeattle and Elliott Bay Book Company will be welcoming the great Algerian novelist Kaouther Adimi during her US tour for the release of Our Riches, translated by Chris Andrew and published by New Directions. The novel was originally published by le Seuil in 2018 with the title Nos richesses.
Saturday, April 18
11am - 12.30pm
Elliott Bay Bookstore
1521 10th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
Discussion with the author in French with English translation, followed by a book signing.
Free event.
About the author
Born in 1986 in Algiers, Kaouther Adimi spent her childhood between France and Algeria, where she studied French Literature
and Human Relations. After being noticed by the jury of the French Institute's short story competition, she published her first novel L'Envers
des autres (Barzakh,
2010; Seuil, 2011) and received the Vocation Prize. Our Riches, her third novel and her first in English, was shortlisted for the
Goncourt and won the Prix Renaudot, the Prix du Style, the Prix Beur FM Méditerranée, and the Choix Goncourt de l’Italie. Her latest novel Les
petits de décembre,
published in September 2019 by le Seuil, is once again longlisted for the Prix Renaudot.
About the book
Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto "by the young, for the young", discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937.
His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers.
Cutting brilliantly from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it's a hymn to the book and to the love of books.
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