Cross-readings: Karelle Ménine, Baptiste Gaillard, Sara Mychkine, Isabelle Gaudet-Labine & Seynabou Sonko

Franco-Swiss author Karelle Ménine explores in her work our relationship to literature and the world of images. Her passion for archives regularly leads her to delve into personal or anonymous documents. She holds a degree in contemporary history from the Université Jean Jaurès in Toulouse and in journalism from the Institut de Journalisme in Paris. She has worked as a reporter for France Culture and Swiss public radio (Radio Suisse Romande). She has collaborated several times with the Avignon Festival, and her book La Pensée, la Poésie et le Politique (Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2015) was adapted for the Comédie-Française in 2020, revived in 2023, and then taken on tour. She has published two books about her interventions in public space (La phrase. Une expérience de pensée urbaine and Voyage entre les langues, both published by Gallimard).

Baptiste Gaillard (1982, Lausanne) is a writer, artist, and cultural mediator. His work revolves around language, sensitivity, and transitional states. Winner of the Swiss Literature Prize in 2018, he has published six books, including Un test de fragilité (Héros-Limite, 2024). He is a member of the editorial board of L’Ours Blanc and teaches at La Manufacture and HKB (Bern).

Born in Paris in 1998, Sara Mychkine is a Franco-Tunisian poet. A member of the editorial board of Débridé magazine, she is also the editor of La Poétique de l'oeuvre, chronicles of a feminist, philosophical and decolonial history of art, published in the form of a newsletter and in the columns of the Hiya! media.

A daughter of the Lanaudière countryside, Isabelle Gaudet-Labine has lived and worked in Montréal for over twenty years. Author of several poetry books, she offers a voice that is both powerful and subtle — one that stands firm in the face of all that turns to ashes.

Seynabou Sonko is a Paris-based artist from the Senegalese diaspora. A graduate of UQAM in Montreal, ENSAV La Cambre in Brussels and Université Paris 8, she has developed a body of work at the crossroads of literature, music and cinema. Her first literary works appeared in magazines such as Sabir, Muscle and Sève. In 2023, she published her first novel, Djinns, with Editions Grasset, which won the Prix du Cheval Blanc and the Prix de la Porte Dorée. Also a musician, screenwriter and singer, Seynabou Sonko has established herself as a singular new voice on the contemporary literary scene. Her ever-expanding artistic project focuses on the dialectic of overflow, whether it's a question of language through the notion of creolization developed by Martinique poet, novelist and philosopher Édouard Glissant, or the hybridity characteristic of Giallo, the Italian genre novels and films that straddle the border between crime, horror and eroticism. Driven by an intense creative energy, Seynabou Sonko questions forms, codes and allegiances, the better to subvert them and offer a work that is free, moving and profoundly contemporary.