Epic Annette
A Heroine's Tale
Epic Annette: A Heroine’s Tale is the story of real-life Anne Beaumanoir, a courageous, brilliant woman born in Brittany in 1923. Guided by a passion for justice and a fervent belief in self-determination she joined the French Resistance and moved to Paris at the age of nineteen, where she saved the lives of two Jewish children.
She married and settled into post-war Marseille, giving birth to two sons, but put that comfortable life at risk by supporting the Algerian FLN in France, resulting in her being imprisoned in 1959 while pregnant with a third child. After making a dramatic escape she then served in the Ministry of Health under newly-independent Algeria’s first president Ben Bella until his overthrow in 1965. Having been found guilty in absentia and sentenced to ten years in prison, she lived in exile in Switzerland until an amnesty allowed her to return to France.
In a series of Homeric asides, Anne Weber discusses the ethical and philosophical aspects of Annette’s life choices. She resembles the great Mediterranean heroes Odysseus and Aeneas; her character is her destiny, peripatetic, always exploring, ultimately not tragic but not without costly personal sacrifice.
‘It pushes linguistic, narrative and genre conventions to their limits, while posing big ethical questions, as its heroine’s idealism comes up against dirty realpolitik.’ — TLS Review of the German Edition
Anne Weber is a German-French author, translator into both French and German and self-translator. She studied in Paris and has worked for several publishers.
Anne Weber started writing and publishing in French, but immediately translated her first book Ida invente la poudre into German as Ida erfindet das Schießpulver. Since then she has written each of her books in French and German.
Her self-translations are often published at the same time in France and Germany. In 2005 she received the 3Sat award at the Festival of German-Language Literature. For her translation of Pierre Michon she received a European translation award, the Europäischer Übersetzerpreis Offenburg. She was awarded the 2020 German Book Prize for Annette, ein Heldinnenepos which has sold more than 200,000 copies.
Tess Lewis has received many accolades and awards including two PEN Translates grants and has been shortlisted for British prizes including the Schlegel-Tieck award (2019, for Lutz Seiler’s Kruso, published by Scribe) and the Oxford/Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
She has been involved with PEN in the USA, and New Books in German, and has held many positions of responsibility and curation as well as writing and moderating.
