France -Inès Bayard
Inès Bayard was born in Toulouse, France, in 1991. She lived and studied in Paris for several years before relocating in 2017 to Berlin, where she is currently based. Le malheur du bas (This Little Family) published last year in Chinese translation by Nanjing University Press under the title 隐痛 is her first novel. An extract reads: “Before revealing any facts that might incite rash judgements, let’s take the time to ponder for a moment the body of the dead woman, surrounded by her family; hers is the only figure in the scene that has remained upright.” Marie and her husband Laurent live a quiet, uneventful life until one day Marie is raped by the branch director of the bank she works for. She decides to keep her silence. When she finds herself pregnant, she is persuaded that the father of the unborn child must be the rapist. Trapped by her own silence, isolated within her family – and her couple – her despair pushes her to take the worst possible way out in a setting of insufferable ordinariness. Inès Bayard has launched her literary career with a poignant and powerful novel. She succeeds in evoking the married life of a young woman of today through the prism of rape. A remarkable achievement.
