Violaine Bérot: "The most important thing for me in a residence is to be able to work in peace and in a natural environment"

French writer Violaine Bérot, author of a dozen novels, arrived at MUHBA Vil·la Joana invited by Liternatura festival, and she carried out a three-week literary residency last September. This is by no means the first residency in her career: “I usually do literary residencies. And the most important thing for me is to be able to work in peace and in a natural environment. Vil·la Joana perfectly meets these two criteria”. The stay was a great opportunity for her to move forward with her new project, a novel about old age and death. “I started working on it a few months before the residency, and I’ll have to continue for a few more months. The dates of the stay suited me very well, because it was at a time when I needed to isolate myself to keep going”.

Thus, unlike other residents, Bérot had little cultural life in the city of Barcelona, but she did take the opportunity to meet up with her publishing house in Spain, Las Afueras, and talk about future projects. The author attaches great importance to residencies of this kind, but she believes that each author has his or her own way of doing things and therefore each one has to know whether to do them or not. “I can only tell you the effect they have on my writing: they allow me to stay very focused on what I’m doing, they even make me change the way I write, and they also allow me to isolate myself, especially when I don’t know the language “.

Bérot hopes to return soon to present the translation of some of her novels. In recent years she has Comme des bêtes (2021), C’est plus beau là-bas (2022) and Nuits de noces  (2023).

More information, here.