Born in Liège in 1981, Antoine Wauters is a Belgian poet and novelist. He is the author of “Our Mothers” in 2014 (SGDL Revelation Prize, First Prize) republished in the coll. Folio, “Think of the stones under your feet” and recently “Mahmoud or the rise of water” (Wepler Prize, Marguerite Duras Prize), as well as “The Museum of Contradictions” published by Sous-Sol.
Antoine Wauters is one of the guests of the festival “Break-ins” at the BPI of the Center Pompidou in Paris, from February 24 to 28, 2022.
“Syria. An old man rows aboard a boat, alone in the middle of a huge expanse of water. Below him, his childhood home, engulfed by Lake el-Assad, born from the construction of the Tabqa dam in 1973.
Closing his eyes to the rumbling war, equipped with a mask and a snorkel, he dives – and it is his whole life that he sees again, his children at the time when they had not yet left to fight, Sarah, his crazy wife in love with poetry, prison, his first love, his thirst for freedom.” (Presentation of Verdier editions)
“Voices rise, approach the center of the stage that is this book and express themselves. What binds them is that they all carry contradictions. world where you have to constantly choose sides. But here, man is neither good nor bad. He hesitates, suffers, hopes and doubts, like all of us. Isn’t that our experience? today? Seeking somehow to harmonize our words and actions? Trying to find meaning where there is no longer any? Seeing that things are hopeless, and yet being determined to want to change them?
An address to readers that intensifies poetry, a way of reclaiming discourse in the form of news. Antoine Wauters always goes further in exploring the frontiers of the novel, and we follow him.” (Presentation of basement editions)
“A child and his mother live on a hill, in a country in the Middle East. While the war has taken away the father, they would like to snuggle up to each other, to love each other and to tell each other. But the mother, terrified at the thought of losing her son, hid him in the attic. To escape boredom, the boy escapes in daydreams, solitary games. When the fighting resumes, he is sent to Europe where another woman is waiting for him, convinced that he will help her conquer her own ghosts.This novel, cruel and tender at the same time, is above all the formidable cry of a child who, in the suffocation that threatens him, opposes a fierce desire to live.” (Presentation of the Folio/Gallimard collection).