Jean-Michel Olivier

Jean-Michel Olivier is a Swiss writer, born on 18 December 1952 in Nyon. He read literature at the University of Geneva under Jean Starobinski and Michel Butor, and his thesis on Lautréamont earned him the Hentsch Prize in 1978. He taught French and English at the Collège de Saussure from 1978 to 2016, and wrote literary, theatre and music criticism for the Tribune de Genève and La Suisse between 1987 and 1994. Since 2006 he has edited the "Poche Suisse" list at L'Âge d'Homme. He publishes roughly a book a year, alternating essays and novels, among them "La Mémoire engloutie" (1990), "L'Enfant secret" (2003, Michel-Dentan Prize 2004), "L'Amour nègre" (2010, Prix Interallié), "Passion noire" (2017), "Éloge des fantômes" (2019) and "Fête des pères" (2023).