Vincent Engel was born in Brussels in 1963. When he was five years old, he began to invent stories (the poor, deprived child had no television), and at age nine, he started to try to write them. School for him was clearly a waste of time. When he got home, he wouldn’t waste any of his energies on lessons and homework, either, preferring to devote his time to his passions.
This resulted in a somewhat complicated academic trajectory until he finally went to university, thanks to the tenacious will of his father, for whom a son without a university education was not his son.
Although he hated school and the teachers who didn’t predict much of a future for him, he definitely enjoyed earning a doctorate in literature and becoming a university professor specializing in contemporary French literature. He had a particular interest in issues of memory, especially concerning the Holocaust and what he calls the desire to remember (2020).
At the same time, he continued to pursue his writing and chanced upon a crazy publisher couple from Quebec, who would put out his first collections of novellas and become his good friends.
In 2000, he completed Retour à Montechiarro (Fayard, 2001), Volume I of the World of Asmodée Edern, which met with great commercial success.
Today Vincent wears many hats: professor at the University of Louvain, novelist, playwright – in particular as friend and right-hand man (although he is left-handed) to the late Franco Dragone for a decade – and screenwriter, not to mention his many collaborations with the press and the media as a columnist and literary critic.
Translated by Richard Kutner. Richard Kutner is an independent translator of fiction and non-fiction. His translations include After the Roundup, by Joseph Weismann, and Cast Away on the Letter A, by Fred, for which he was awarded a Hemingway Translation Grant from the Book Office of the French Embassy in the United States.
Follow me on Instagram : @vincent_engel_officiel
