Mémoire d’encrier: 20 years of writing the world
Conversation with Rodney Saint-Eloi and Philippe Yong
Centre culturel canadien
October 03rd, 2023
20:00 - 21:30
Mémoire d’encrier is celebrating its 20th anniversary! 20 years of bringing together voices from every continent. Writer and publisher Rodney Saint-Eloi and author Philippe Yong will be in conversation at the Canadian Cultural Centre to mark the occasion. The discussion will focus on the legacy of this major publishing house and the publication in France of Philippe Yong’s Hors-sol.
Founded and directed by writer Rodney Saint-Éloi, Mémoire d’encrier aims to tell the untold, to shed light on what has long been silent. Weaving together encounters and dialogues, we celebrate the human and the living. Mémoire d’encrier aims to think about the other in a different way, the other in the plural, by opening multiple windows, in a no-holds-barred way, in a world where nothing is more lacking than dialogue.
Hors-sol, published by Mémoire d’encrier, is Philippe Yong’s striking first novel, a utopian quest for belonging that takes us on a journey through France, Canada, Iceland and Portugal, against a backdrop of ecological crisis, in pursuit of Alvare, a nomadic agronomist looking for a paradise outside the world. After Paris, he lands in Montreal, where he believes he will find this Eden in a hydroponic greenhouse on a wasteland: The Field of Possibilities…
Born in France of Korean parents, Philippe Yong lives in Montreal, where he teaches literature. Hors-sol is his first novel.
Rodney Saint-Éloi is a poet, writer, essayist and editor. Born in Cavaillon, Haiti, he is the author of some twenty books. An anthology of his poetry has been published in France under the title Nous ne trahirons pas le poème et autres recueils (Éditions Points, 2021). In 2022, he published Quand il fait triste Bertha chante (Héloïse D’Ormesson), a finalist for the France Télévision 2022 novel prize, and Les racistes n’ont jamais vu la mer (Mémoire d’encrier), which he co-wrote with Yara El-Ghadban. He heads the Mémoire d’encrier publishing house, which he founded in 2003 in Montreal.
The event will be hosted by Aïnhoa Jean-Calmettes, head of literature and ideas at Magazine Mouvement.
Book sales will be handled by the Librairie du Québec in Paris.
