60 authors invited to debate and question the world in which we live

“It’s dangerous to come here, you want to read everything and buy everything.” In the aisles of the Bron book fair, Michèle Saint-Lager, a smiling sixty-something, may pretend to be overwhelmed by temptation, she feels here in her element. This literature lover makes the trip to the Parilly racecourse near Lyon almost every year. This is where the Bron Book Festival welcomes nearly 20,000 visitors for three days (from March 3 to 5, 2023). An unmissable literary event that leaves as much room for established authors as for first-time novelists.

The quality of literary encounters

Michèle Saint-Lager is looking for her words: “Meetings here are affordable, not too intellectual, she admits intimidated. And to tell the magic of meetings and discussions. “Yesterday with Florence Aubenas (coming to present his latest work Here and elsewhere, selected pieces of his work as a journalist), I don’t know how to explain it to you but his words transported me. She has incredible charisma and humanity.”

Florence Aubenas, Philippe Claudel, Lola Lafon, Philippe Jaenada, Valentine Goby, Lydie Salvayre and Brigitte Giraud, winner of the Goncourt 2022 with live fast (éd Gallimard), Bron’s book festival can pride itself on welcoming those who make the front page of literary news each year, but it is above all to the quality of its encounters that it owes its success and to the diversity of its guests: novelists, poets, philosophers, historians or musicians.

A place to live

The event seeks to fit into today’s world. Red thread of the 2013 edition: A place to live. A theme born in the mind of its director Yann Nicol a year ago. Invited in 2022, the philosopher Claire Marin presented her book To be in her placepublished by the editions of the Observatory. “This book raised the question of our place in the world, the place we have, the place we gain, the place we are assigned to, the place we want to conquer, explains Yann Nicol enthusiastically. These are the issues that really interested me. Afterwards, there was all this reflection that we had this summer with the environmental question, the relationship to the habitability of the world of tomorrow.

It is therefore habitable spaces and places that are in question. Geographical spaces first of all which question our relationship to displacement, exile and migrations but also symbolic spaces which speak for example of our relationship to the family, and even these virtual spaces where we are supposed to live together but where one bumps into a harsh loneliness. The words of Georges Perec resonate: “To live is to move from one space to another trying as much as possible not to bump into each other,” he wrote in Space Species published in 1974.

It is from a unique place that the writer Lola Lafon was inspired to write her latest book entitled When you listen to this song, at Stock. The publisher offered him, to write it, to spend a night in a museum of his choice. She chose the annex of the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, where the young girl lived before her arrest and deportation. “It’s true that there was both this very concrete place where I spent a whole night, but I have the impression that I went there having another place in me, testifies the author who received the magazine’s novel prize The Inrockables. That is to say the place of emptiness in a family and what we do with it. I didn’t think about things like that at first. It occurred to me during the writing.”

In Bron, Lola Lafon had the opportunity to meet readers, to tell her questions and her creative process and to dialogue with other authors. Exchanges of great richness around the question of silence, the unspoken and the absence of narrative of the deportees. “For me it’s always unexpectedshe says. You never know how a book will be received.” Lola remembers this couple of barely 20 years old met in Grenoble. “He Palestinian and she Ukrainian. Both told me how much this reading was necessary, it really touched me a lot.” From Bron she left with handwritten letters written to her by other upset readers.

Behind the scenes of creation

The Bron Book Festival is undoubtedly a place to experience literature intensely. “A protected space to listen to authors and talk about their universe, confides Dominique Perrin, a regular at the event. When I come here, I’m not available to anyone, I turn off my phone and immerse myself in my bubble.” Her friend with whom she shares this day out of time agrees. “You meet people who love books, we talk to each other very easily, she adds. There is a real community between the readers”.

But what appeals above all to these lovers of literature is to discover the backstage of creation. Like this story told by Xavier Le Clerc who remembers the quantity of pancakes he compulsively devoured while writing his last book, An untitled man (ed Gallimard), the portrait of his father born in Kabylie whose life was marked by hunger and torture. Strong and moving testimonies, like adding soul to the story. Here the readers have the feeling of being privileged.