Sphinx

Anne F. Garreta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalien (graduate of France's prestigious Ecole normale superieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Anne F. Garreta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), hailed by critics, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator's love interest, A***. Her second novel, Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), told the fate of a character losing the use of language. In La Decomposition (Grasset, 1999) , a serial killer methodically murdered characters from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994 and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won France's prestigious Prix Medicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent" (she is the second Oulipian to win the award---Georges Perec won in 1978), for her latest novel, Pas un jour (Grasset, 2002). Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University, and received her Master's in Literary Translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian's Monospace is forthcoming from La Presse. She is currently on a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco.