Awards/Surrealist Dinner
Utter the word "Surrealist" and you are rewarded with a flood of images out of Salvador Dali: giant eggs and sea urchins, watches that droop like uncooked pizzas, lobsters replacing telephone handsets, a coat festooned with dozens of tiny glasses, each one filled with milk.... But the fact that the Surrealists met in a café should remind us they also enjoyed good food. Nor must we forget that, like all poets and painters, their extravagant imagination and appetite for sensation often found expression in the kitchen.
The Paris Writers Workshop's first literary dinner in 2007 was a resounding success, sold out long before the diners sat down to a delicious meal and a program of music and poetry. We can promise that the 2008 dinner will be even more memorable.
The dinner will also be the occasion for the announcement of the winner of our First $5000 Fiction prize.
Twentieth Annual Paris Writers Workshop
previous stop press
British novelist to judge first Paris Prize
British writer Matt Thorne has agreed to judge the first $5000 Paris prize for fiction. Born in 1974, Matt grew up in Bristol, graduated from Cambridge University, and published six novels before he turned thirty. Tourist, (1998) attacked the negative effects of tourism on a seaside town. Eight Minutes Idle (1999) drew on his experiences working in a call centre, and won an Encore Award, while his 2004 novel Cherry was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His critical study of the rock musician Prince will be published in 2010.
A regular critic for national newspapers, Matt has written screenplays and plays for radio, and several books for young adults, including the 39 Castles series, about a group of high-spirited children in medieval England.
Another PWW success story!
Natalia Sarkissian (PWW 2007) writes: "Congratulations on your lovely new website. I would love to attend PWW this year, but as a result of last year's short-story workshop with Manette Ansay I was awarded a merit scholarship by Vermont College, where I am currently enrolled! I can safely say it is all thanks to you and your wonderful program that my life has taken a new and unexpected turn."
The Organisers
Meet Marcia and John, the people who made this year's PWW happen.
Marcia Lèbre
Marcia Mead Lèbre, who has lived in France since 1973, is a poet, translator, and teacher.... She attended her first Paris Writers Workshop in 1992 as a beginning writer and discovered her vocation as a poet. After participating in several more PWW's, she returned to graduate school and earned a M.F.A. at Bennington College She has directed the Paris Writers Workshop since 1998.
John Baxter
John Baxter was born in Australia but has written and taught in London, Dublin, Los Angeles and, for the last 18 years, in Paris. He is the author of more than 40 books, including We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, A Pound of Paper; Confessions of a Book Addict, the forthcoming Immoveable Feast; A Paris Christmas, and biographies of Robert DeNiro, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen.
