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Richard Millet is a French author. He was born in Viam, Corrèze in 1953. He spent part of his childhood in Lebanon and now lives in Paris. In 1994 he won the Essay Prize from the Académie Française for his book Le Sentiment de la langue (“The Feeling of Language”).

His work revolves around themes of time, death and language and is not without a certain Proustian quality. His prose style has a richness and complexity that could be said to belong to a French tradition spanning from Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet to Claude Simon. Its rhythmic quality also gives it an elegance reminiscent of Marguerite Yourcenar.

Several of his novels are set in the village of Siom (Viam’s literary counterpart), including La Gloire des Pythre (“The Glory of the Pythres”), L'Amour des trois s?urs Piale (“The Love of the Three Piale Sisters”), Lauve le pur (“Lauve the Pure”), and Ma vie parmi les ombres (“My Life Among the Shadows”). More generally, the Plateau de Millevaches - its landscape, climate, geographic location and the evolution of the lives of its inhabitants over the course of the century - is an essential element in his work, as Haute-Provence was for Giono, the county of Yoknapatawpha for Faulkner or Wessex for Thomas Hardy.

Millet mixes religious elements with coarse language, evoking the French Catholic tradition in a way that acknowledges the modern sexual revolution. Desire, suffering and evil are themes that permeate all of his work.

He is also an editor at Gallimard, where he played a decisive role in the publication of Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes, which won the 2006 Prix Goncourt.

The September 2007 publication of Désenchantement de la littérature, in which he denounces the inanity of contemporary French literature and the loss of religious feeling in the West, generated a good deal of controversy.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Richard Millet", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0