2023-10-29 16:00:05
Jean-Claude Mourlevat, in Paris, in June 2022. CHLOÉ VOLLMER-LO
Jean-Claude Mourlevat’s children were still very young when he published his children’s novel in 1999. The Ocean Child (Pocket Jeunesse), followed, less than a year later, by the first volume of The Upside Down Riverfrom the same publisher. “I am extremely lucky, they have always read and supported me”, recognizes the 71-year-old writer. He sometimes meets author friends who admit to him that their own children do not read their books. “I don’t know if I would have continued if that had been the case…”, he says to him. When, a few years later, he wrote books like The Winter Fight (Gallimard Jeunesse, 2006), or Earthling (Gallimard Jeunesse, 2011), he realized that his heroes had followed the advancing age of his children. He then returned to younger characters, such as the famous hedgehog Jefferson, when they became adults.
In 2021, Jean-Claude Mourlevat received the Astrid-Lindgren prize, a prestigious Swedish award created in 2002. The first French recipient of this youth equivalent of the Nobel Prize for literature, he lives near Saint-Etienne, on the banks of the Loire, there where his children, now 28 and 26 years old, grew up, leaving to make a life a few hundred kilometers from the family home.
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When did you first feel like a father?
I felt it very strongly at birth, of course. Although we expected it, I was stunned. My child had very severe jaundice, we couldn’t approach him, we saw him through a window: this fragile little being was mine! This feeling continues for a long time. I feel as much a father to this child today as I did twenty-eight years ago, when he was tiny.
Have you ever cried in front of your children?
When they were little, I hid to spare them this spectacle. The first time it happened, one of them was in New Zealand for a year. We spent ten days together traveling in a van and, as we said goodbye, I collapsed at the thought of leaving him. I told him afterwards that I was sorry, that it wasn’t planned like that. I was overwhelmed by emotion!
What is the worst thing you have said to your children?
I don’t think I ever said anything against them. But I said some good old boomer things which must have been annoying, difficult for them to hear. I’ve improved since then, I hope.
What is the worst thing your children have said to you?
Once I was an idiot. It was accidental.
What is the habit that annoyed you in your parents and that you still reproduce?
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