A Respectable Occupation

‘The best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood,’ Hemingway famously said. Julia Kerninon, one of France’s most acclaimed young novelists, tells an altogether different story in a poetic account of her pursuit. Her journey through her formative years entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions, resulting in a vibrant ode to reading, and to writing as a space for discovery (as well as a ‘respectable occupation’), peppered with fine portraits of her disjointed yet loving family. From her native Brittany to the city of Shakespeare and Company, to a seaside café on the Atlantic coast, to Budapest and back, the author conjures a fluid, feminine answer to A Moveable Feast. On the 50th anniversary of the first Creative Writing Course in the UK, at UEA, this new book by a writer under 30 presents an old-school approach to authorship.