29^th Leukerbad International Literary Festival

Authors

Céline Zufferey

Switzerland

Born in 1991, Céline Zufferey is a writer with Valaisian roots who lives in Lyon. Zufferey studied French literature and social anthropology at the University of Fribourg and earned a master’s degree at the Bern School of Fine Arts. She has won multiple awards for her works.
About Céline Zufferey’s second novel Nitrate, the journalist Cécile Lecoultre wrote in 24heures: “To encircle ‘movement writing’, Céline Zufferey has perfected the art of literary traveling with a rare fluidity.” Sauver les meubles (Save the Furniture), published in 2017, also with Gallimard, explores how things determine our lives and takes a critical look at consumerism.
In a column, Zufferey has compared her writing with the work of an elite athlete: “To write something good and sustain it over many pages for the length of a book requires the stable, constrained, and occasionally monotonous day to day life of an elite athlete. … The immense freedom that comes with the writing profession demands a great deal of discipline.”
For the “Vanished Places” project in the framework of the Leukerbad International Literary Festival, Céline Zufferey has set out in search of vanished bends in the Rhone River—called the Rotte in Valaisian German—which were eliminated by corrections of the river’s flow, near the place where she grew up. She will present the resulting text during the Festival.

Nitrate. Novel. Éditions Gallimard 2023
Sauver les meubles. Novel. Éditions Gallimard 2017

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