Events

Music is anything but a job to Yael Naim and David Donatien. It’s entwined in every aspect of life for these musical and romantic partners, who recorded their third album together in their family home on the outskirts of Paris.

At first Donatien was helping her to realise the potential of her own songs. An earlier album recorded for EMI at the start of the 2000s, before they met, had been a disaster for her and was never released??[SHE SAYS IT WASN’T, WIKIPEDIA SAYS IT WAS]. “I was in my Alanis Morissette period. It was just bad, horrible,” she says. “I was working with people who were not good for me. Then I decided that instead of meeting music business people, I would try to meet musicians. I took a gig as a pianist and David was the percussionist. We immediately connected to each other. He wasvery calm, not pretentious. He was listening, observing, trying to see how he could help me.”

Naim is at her most soulful on Dream in My Head, a swaying, grandiose song that could be a Bond them

Introduced by Eugène Nicole, Professor of French, NYU.

Award winning novelist Maylis de Kerangal began her career in publishing for Gallimard's youth department, later founding the children's book publishing house Editions du baron perché. She published her first novel, Je marche sous un ciel de traîne in 2000. Her American Western-influenced Naissance d’un pont (Birth of a Bridge, Talon Books, 2014) received both the Prix Medicis and Prix Franz Hessel. Réparer les vivants, also published to great acclaim, was adapted for the stage at the Festival d’Avignon, receiving rave reviews for its intimate look at the realities and philosophical questioning of organ donation. The book will be published in English in the spring by Farrar Straus and Giroux. Kerangal has also contributed to the Inculte Collective, a journal of critical, philosophical, and speculative writing. Her work has been widely praised for its scope, originality, and use of language. The style of her prose is rich and innovat