Literature, War and Witness: A Conversation with Odile Hellier

Odile Hellier; Ellen Hinsey

doi:10.18422/79-2821

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Odile Hellier
Ellen Hinsey

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https://doi.org/10.18422/79-2821

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Odile Hellier

Odile Hellier was born in 1942, in Montpellier. She studied at the University of Rennes, and in 1966, following a one-year research scholarship in Moscow (1964-1965) she completed her Master’s on the topic “The Theme of the Great Soviet Patriotic War in the Contemporary Soviet Novel, 1941-1945.” She then taught Russian language and literature, but following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia she resigned from teaching Russian. After further training at the Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Paris: Ecole d’Interprètes et de Traducteurs, she worked in Washington DC. Her translation of Michael Thellwell’s work: “Fish are Jumping an’ the Cotton is High: Notes from the Mississippi Delta” (1966), was published in Sartre’s review Les Temps Modernes (1971). In 1971, she also co-translated, with Jean Gouriou, Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (Manuel de l’animateur social, Editions du Seuil, 1971). In 1982, she opened the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris. For the next 30 years, it was one of Paris’s most important intellectual meeting places for international writers. In 2024, her memoir Village Voices (Seven Stories Press) was published, an homage to a generation of Anglophone American, and world, authors.

Ellen Hinsey

Ellen Hinsey is the author of ten books of poetry, essays, dialogue and literary translation. Her recent works include Anatomy of the Eclipse, The Invisible Fugue and The Illegal Age, which was a National Poetry Series Finalist as well as the UK Poetry Book Society’s 2018 Autumn Choice. Hinsey’s essays on dangers to democracy are collected in Mastering the Past: Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism. Her other books include Update on the Descent, also a National Poetry Series Finalist, The White Fire of Time and Cities of Memory, which received the Yale University Series Award. Her book-length dialogue with Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, Magnetic North, was a finalist for Lithuania’s Book of the Year and has appeared in seven languages. She is the recipient of numerous awards and her work has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung among many others. A former Berlin Prize fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, she has most recently been a visiting professor at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.

Literature, War and Witness: A Conversation with Odile Hellier

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Odile Hellier

Ellen Hinsey

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