Pierre Adrian

Pierre Adrian (France, 1991) is a writer. He published his first book in 2015, La Piste Pasolini, an initiatory travelogue 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 went on to publish 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, her novel Que reviennent ceux qui sont loin was published by Gallimard. On its release, Marine Landrot wrote in Télérama: “Rare are writings so limpid and crafted, capable of arousing an emotion close to tears.” A journalist by training, soccer fan and cycling enthusiast, Pierre Adrian has been a columnist for L’Équipe newspaper since 2016.

As part of his residency at Villa Medici, Pierre Adrian is attempting to sculpt a book from Carrara marble. By following the marble route, focusing on the very essence of the mineral and its exploitation by man, he intends to write a novel that combines the history of the place, the political and ecological struggle in the heart of a wounded mountain, a paradise that has become a white hell. The quarry will be a place of fantasy and secrecy, of creation and destruction, of enslavement and resistance, of man’s finest and most debased ambitions. In telling the story of Carrara marble, he attempts to write about stone, the territory of the imaginary, “immutable in the inexhaustible, like poetry”, in the words of Roger Caillois.