Soirée IVY PROSE avec Aden Ellias, Barry Kirwan et Marie Houzelle le 31 mars à BERKELEY BOOKS of PARIS

Ivy Writers Paris fête la prose ! Venez à notre première soirée « IVY PROSE », avec lectures en français et en anglais le 31 mars 2015 à 19h00 à la libraire BERKELEY BOOKS, Paris, par les auteurs 

Barry Kirwan (anglais, auteur de la tétralogie EDEN PARADOX) 

Aden Ellias (français, auteur de PASSAGES) 

et Marie Houzelle (française, auteur de TITA)

English version: Ivy Writers Paris invites you to our very first PROSE reading on the 31^st of March at 7:00PM at Berkeley Books with the novelists Barry Kirwan, Marie Houzelle and Aden Ellias!

31 mars // à partir de 19h00

à la libraire Berkeley Books

8 Rue Casimir Delavigne,

75006 Paris

Join Ivy’s FB group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/101898279922603/

Bios en français and then below in English

Aden Ellias, écrivain et performeur, est l’auteur des recueils Aucune Bretagne (2008) et Passages (2013,  en accès libre sur http://passageslobjet.blogspot.fr, avec une lettre-postface d’Y. di Manno). Ellias est également journaliste web & presse écrite sous divers pseudonymes. Autres Publications : Runbook art book (2012), Zaporogue literary mag (2013), Stonecutter journal of art and literature (2014). Son premier roman paraît en France au printemps 2015 aux éditions E-FRACTIONS (http://e-fractions.com). Il nous lira quelques extraits de ce livre ce soir.

Barry Kirwan est l’auteur britannique de la tétralogie The Eden Paradox : le Paradoxe d’Eden (initialement prévu comme une trilogie) qui est comprise de Eden Paradox,  Eden’s Trial,   Eden’s Revenge et Eden’s Endgame (le dernire a été publié fin 2014). Il est également l’auteur de nouvelles e prose et du genre science-fiction, en partie disponible sur son site www.barrykirwan.com. Il vit et travaille en France. Son projet d’écriture actuel est un thriller intitulé Sixty-Six Metres (soixante-six mètres) et un nouveau ouvrage de la science-fiction intitulé Last Human (Dernier Humain).

Marie Houzelle est née dans le sud de la France et vit maintenant à Ivry, près de Paris. Elle séjourne volontiers à Londres, Berlin, Dublin, Amsterdam, Brooklyn ou Berkeley chez des inconnus qui, en échange, occupent son appartement. Elle écrit surtout en anglais mais pourrait bien prendre goût à la langue de Marcel Proust. On trouve ses poèmes et nouvelles dans Serre-Feuilles, Pharos, Orbis, Van Gogh’s Ear, Narrative Magazine, dans son chapbook No Sex Last Noon (I Want Press), et dans le recueil Best Paris Stories (Summertime Publications). « Hortense on Tuesday Night » (en anglais) et « Belle-famille » (en français) sont disponibles en Kindle Single. Son roman Tita (Summertime Publications) a paru en septembre 2014 et la version numérique est maintenant disponible. Une traduction allemande sera publiée prochainement par Random House Germany. Pour en savoir plus, voir ici : https://houzelle.wordpress.com.

Aden Ellias is a performer and writer. He is the author of Aucune Bretagne (selected poems 2008) and Passages (2013 free access http://passageslobjet.blogspot.fr). Ellias is also a web journalist who has published other writings under various pseudonyms. Contributions : Runbook art book (2012), Zaporogue literary mag (2013), Stonecutter journal of art and literature (2014). His debut novel is forthcoming in spring 2015 with the publisher éditions E-FRACTIONS (http://e-fractions.com). He will share a few extracts from this book with us tonight!

Marie Houzelle is a fiction writer who grew up in the south of France. She studied linguistics in Toulouse, Rennes and Berlin and now lives in Ivry, near Paris, with her bicycle. She sings and dreams in a few European languages but writes mostly in English, sometimes in French. Houzelle’s stories and poems have appeared in Serre-Feuilles, Pharos, Orbis, Van Gogh's Ear, Narrative Magazine, in her chapbook No Sex Last Noon (I Want Press) and in the collection Best Paris Stories (Summertime Publications). “Hortense on Tuesday Night” (in English) and “Belle-famille” (in French) are available in Kindle Single. Tonight we will be celebrating the launch of her first novel Tita which was published by Summertime Publications in fall 2014. (ISBN 978-1-940333-01-4) It is now also available as an ebook. A German translation is forthcoming with Random House Germany. Publisher’s Weekley wrote that “In Houzelle’s first novel, Tita is a seven-year-old girl growing up in the south of France in the 1950s whose life seems to be defined by obstacles: the many foods that disgust her, the school that fails to challenge her, and parents who struggle to understand her. …Through Houzelle’s sharp, straightforward prose (which captures Tita’s perspective), the story of how Tita grows takes center stage.” And Tripfiction wrote “Houzelle is terrific at capturing the ambience of rural France in the 1950s, and the nature of a young girl who is avidly engaging with the world around her. The book has a real old fashioned feel to it, it is beautifully written, it is funny, astute and warm, and the locale is very much an enveloping character in the book – you can almost smell the garrigue. A delightful read!” For more on Marie Houzelle or her book TITA, see her website at https://houzelle.wordpress.com.

Barry Kirwan first wrote fiction at the age of fifteen, delivering a popular weekly fantasy serial for his school class-mates. After leaving university he turned to non-fiction and had four books published in the domain of his day job, which concerns the avoidance of human error in large-scale industrial and aviation accidents. He turned back to fiction when he arrived in Paris in 2001, after attending a writing course by Canadian author Lauren Davis, followed by a Flash Fiction course by Jennifer K. Dick, whereupon he joined a writers group and began writing short stories. During a Paris Writers Workshop, Atlantic Fiction editor Michael C Curtis suggested he turn one of his short stories, called Trouble in Eden, into a novel, and five years later the Eden Paradox was published. The novel received some success, many considering it a revival of classic science-fiction mores with contemporary writing style and novel science fiction ideas. The two most common comments were “I don’t normally read science fiction, but I like this”, and “it’s so cinematic, I can see all the scenes.” The novel became a trilogy, the second and third books each arriving one year later, but the series demanded a final fourth book, Eden’s Endgame, published at the end of 2014. The Eden Paradox series, as with most science fiction, poses questions about humanity. What if the galaxy is inhabited, and we’re not the smartest kids on the block (the Eden Paradox)? Given our propensity for war and ‘inhumanity’ to our fellow man and woman, how would an advanced alien civilisation judge us (Eden’s Trial)?  If we could genetically advance our children, would it be a good idea (Eden’s Revenge)? And if the galaxy needed us in a time of war, would we be up to the challenge, able to rise above our weaknesses and prejudices (Eden’s Endgame)? The series is multi-protagonist and all four books are multi-threaded with tightening plots (Barry calls this ‘tourniquet-plotting), following characters who grow as the books develop, and because it is set in the context of a brewing galactic war, quite a few do not make it to the end. 

There are also a number of short stories – fiction as well as science fiction – freely available on the author’s website www.barrykirwan.com , including one for aspiring and perhaps disillusioned would-be writers, called Writerholics Anonymous, and he publishes a popular blog on the same website dealing with science fiction and what he has learned over the years about the craft of writing. Having finished the Eden Paradox series, he is currently working on a thriller called Sixty-Six Metres, in which a young female Russian agent is trying to retrieve a military device lost at the foot of a shipwreck, while both the Mafia and the CIA are closing in on her, the body count rising steadily throughout the book. Following this project, he plans to return to science fiction with a new novel called Last Human. Barry belongs to a writing group called – somewhat anachronistically – Men with Pens (half the group is female). MWP meets every few weeks at a café in Montparnasse, where the food is good, and the wine flows freely to assuage the sometimes brutal critiquing that serves as the main course. He believes strongly in the utility of writing groups as a resource for authors, particularly those who cannot be full-time writers. He also believes there is something intrinsically literary about Paris, which encourages people to write.