Jean-Claude Mourlevat was born in 1952 in Ambert, a village in the French region of Auvergne.
He made his debut in 1997 with the picture book Histoire de l'enfant et de l'oeuf and has since published about thirty books that have been translated into almost twenty languages, but not yet into Swedish.
- I can hardly believe it's true, says Jean-Claude Mourlevat when the Alma jury calls him during the announcement.
The Alma Jury's motivation reads: “Jean-Claude Mourlevat is a brilliant innovator of the saga's traditions, open to both the most difficult and the most beautiful.
Time and space are abolished in his narrative worlds, and in a dreamy and accurate prose, eternal themes such as longing and love, vulnerability and war are portrayed.
Mourlevat's ever-surprising writing attaches the ancient fabric of the epic to a contemporary reality. ”
Noted works
L'Enfant océan (The Pull of the Ocean) was released in 1999 and is about seven siblings, two of whom are twins, fleeing a threatening home.
The book received a lot of attention and made Jean-Claude Mourlevat known to a wider international audience.
The youth novel Le combat d'hiver (Winter Song) from 2006 has been translated into twenty languages and is about four orphaned boarding students who live under an oppressive system of rules.
Jean-Claude Mourlevat's latest book is from 2018 and is called Jefferson.
In it, the main character is a hedgehog who loves to read.
The hedgehog is innocently accused of murder, he flees and his reading of the novel takes on a life-changing significance.
The text is updated.