Oscar Coop-Phane

Oscar Coop-Phane
Period: 2015-2016
Profession: Writer Oscar Coop-Phane was born in 1988 in France. After hypokhâgne and khâgne (a two-year post-baccalaureat preparatory course for entrance to ENS – Écoles Normales Supérieures),  he decided to make writing his principal occupation. Oscar Coop-Phane published three novels:
Zénith-Hôtel , his first novel, which won the Prix de Flore in 2012,
Tomorrow Berlin in 2013 (both published with Arcadia Books), and
Octobre (‘October’) in 2014. These three novels function as a trilogy on urban wanderings, their loneliness and sorrows. Flammarion published the novellas
Picon Voyageur in 2013 and
Cours de la vie in 2014. He is planning a new trilogy about the excluded: the first part will be released in 2016 by Grasset; the second will be written in Rome. He has lived in Paris, Berlin and Brussels and his works have been translated into English, German and Turkish. He regularly writes chronicles and collaborates with magazines like
Vanity Fair, Numéro Homme, Le Figaro, L’ Inconnu , among others. During his stay at Villa Medici, Oscar Coop-Phane will focus on drafting the second part of a trilogy on the judiciary in Italy. The ensemble will function as a work on standards and those who live at the margins of society, on “sidelining” through the history of the judgment of an infanticide swine in the Papal States during the seventeenth century. Through the trial of a beast – one of  many – it will go from the crime to the punishment to bring to life the soul of each actor : the mother of the child, the judges and witnesses, the executioner, the crowd and the prison guards. Oscar Coop-Phane has conceived this project as a choral novel about a strange historical phenomenon, a reflection on the power of religion and a “modest literary mirror of some Foucauldian theories.”