Pierre Adrian

Pierre Adrian (France, 1991) is a writer. In 2015, he published his first book, La Piste Pasolini, a narrative of an initiatory journey in the footsteps of the Italian poet and filmmaker, for which he received the Prix des Deux-Magots and the Prix François-Mauriac from the Académie Française. Pierre Adrian then published Des Âmes simples (Prix Roger-Nimier), Le Tour de la France par deux enfants d’aujourd’hui (with Philibert Humm) and Les Bons garçons, also published by Les Équateurs. In 2022, his novel Que reviennent ceux qui sont loin was published by Gallimard. On its release, Marine Landrot wrote in Télérama: “Writing that is so clear and elaborate, capable of evoking an emotion close to tears, is a rare thing.” A trained journalist, football fan and cycling enthusiast, Pierre Adrian has been a columnist for the newspaper L’Équipe since 2016.

As part of his residency at the French Academy in Rome, Pierre Adrian attempts to carve a book out of Carrara marble. By following the marble route, examining the very essence of the mineral and its use by man, he wants to write a novel that interweaves the history of the place with the political and ecological struggle in the heart of a wounded mountain, a paradise that has become a white hell. The quarry will serve as a site of fantasy and secrecy, of creation and destruction, of enslavement and resistance, of man’s finest and most debased ambitions. By telling the story of the marble in Carrara, he tries to write the stone, the territory of the imaginary, “unchanging in the inexhaustible, like poetry”, in the words of Roger Caillois.

 

Photo portrait © Daniele Molajoli
Video portrait © Laurent Perreau pour l’Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis