Christiane Singer

Christiane Singer (1943 in Marseille – 4 April 2007 in Vienna) was a French writer, essayist and novelist.

Biography

Her father was of Hungarian origin and her mother was half Russian and half Czech. Because of the persecution of the Jews, her parents fled Hungary, then Austria, and settled in Paris, France, in 1935.[1] She was born eight years later, in 1943, in Marseille.

She is a high school student and a pupil of the Conservatory of Diction and Dramatic Art in Marseille and then studies literature at Aix-en-Provence, where she obtained a Doctorate of Modern Letters.[2]

In 1968, she met Count Georg von Thurn-Valsassina,[2] an architect, who would become her husband, and settled in 1973[1] in his medieval castle of Rastenberg (Austria), not far from Vienna, and will raise their two sons there. This castle inspired the romantic work of the same name in 1996 "Rastenberg". She also organized personal development seminars in her home, which she designed, and which her architect husband built.[2]

In the late 1970s she founded the Dianus-Trikont-Verlag in Munich with the editor Victor Trimondi.

She followed the teachings of Karlfried Graf Dürckheim (a disciple of C.G. Jung).

In Switzerland, she was a lecturer at the University of Basel, then a lecturer at the University of Friburg.

Her work and her personal reflection were entirely centered on the necessary taking into account of the spiritual which broods in everyone's heart. She was a relatively prolific writer, of Christian sensitivity imbued with Oriental wisdom, who refrained from giving lessons in morals and excludeed all dogmatism. She won several literary prizes, including the Prix des libraires for La Mort viennoise in 1979, le Prix Albert Camus for Histoire d'âme in 1989, and le prix de la langue française en 2006 for the whole of her work.

She once said in a radio-interview:

I wrote a book on Les Âges de la vie. I tried to show these metamorphoses of being in the course of life. It is obvious that all this is only valid if one has learned to die in the course of existence. And these occasions are given us so often; All crises, separations, and diseases, and all forms, everything, everything, everything, all invites us to learn and leave behind. Death will take away only what we wanted to possess. The rest, it has no hold on the rest. And it is in this progressive deprivation that an immense freedom is created, and an enlarged space, exactly what was not suspected. I have an immense confidence in aging, because I owe to this acceptance to age an opening that is unsuspected when one has not the audacity to return.[3]

In September 2006, when her doctor announced that she had six months left to live[4] as a result of cancer, she wrote a diary in her last months, which will be published under the title Derniers fragments d'un long voyage. Christiane Singer died in April 2007, at age sixty-four.

Work

Novels
  • 1965: Les Cahiers d'une hypocrite, Albin Michel
  • 1965: Vie et mort du beau Frou, Albin Michel
  • 1976: Chronique tendre des jours amers, Albin Michel
  • 1978: La Mort viennoise, Albin Michel, prix des libraires 1979
  • 1981: La Guerre des filles, Albin Michel, prix Alice-Louis Barthou of the Académie française.[5] 1982
  • 1981: Histoire d'âme, Albin Michel, reissued 2001 prix Albert Camus 1989
  • 1996: Rastenberg, Albin Michel
  • 2002: Les Sept Nuits de la reine, Albin Michel
  • 2006: Seul ce qui brûle, Albin Michel, Prix ALEF 2007.[6]

Essays
  • 1983: Les Âges de la vie, Albin Michel
  • 1992: Une passion. Entre ciel et chair, Albin Michel, Prix Écritures & Spiritualités 1993.
  • 1996: Du bon usage des crises, Albin Michel
  • 2000: Éloge du mariage, de l'engagement et autres folies, Albin Michel (prix Anna de Noailles de l'Académie française.[5]
  • 2001: Où cours-tu, Ne sais-tu pas que le ciel est en toi ?, Albin Michel
  • 2005: N'oublie pas les chevaux écumants du passé, Albin Michel
  • 2007: Derniers fragments d'un long voyage, Albin Michel, ISBN 2226179550 [4] essay / narrative / diary
Collective
  • 2000: La Quête du sens, collectif, Albin Michel, reissued 2004 with Khaled cheikh Bentounès, Marie de Hennezel, Roland Rech, Stan Rougier
  • 2002: Le Grand Livre de la tendresse, Albin Michel,, collective, under the direction of Gérald Pagès, with participations by Boris Cyrulnik, Marie de Hennezel, Dr. Gérard Leleu, Jean-pierre Relier, Stan Rougier, Dr. Michèle Salamagne, Jacques Salomé, Paule Salomon, Christiane Singer

Distinctions
  • 1979: prix des libraires for La Mort viennoise
  • 1982: prix Alice-Louis Barthou de l'Académie française for La Guerre des filles.[5]
  • 1989: prix Albert Camus for Histoire d'âme
  • 1993: prix Écritures & Spiritualités for Une passion. Entre ciel et terre.
  • 2000: prix Anna de Noailles of the Académie française for Éloge du mariage, de l'engagement et autres folies.[5]
  • 2006: prix de la langue française pour l'ensemble de son œuvre
  • 2007: prix ALEF for Seul ce qui brûle.[6]

Documentary about the author
  • Passion - Hommage à Christiane Singer, de la cinéaste autrichienne Carola Mair,[7] documentaire, 45 min.
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References
  1. [http://www.albin-michel.fr/auteur-Christiane-Singer-11193 Biographie, on the site of her publisher, Éditions Albin Michel.
  2. Article de Monique Beltrame, sur le site de Mediapart.
  3. interview on Thierry Lyonnet on RCF, 2001.
  4. Présentation du livre Derniers fragments d'un long voyage, sur le site of publisher, Albin Michel
  5. Ses deux prix de l'Académie Française, sur le site officiel.
  6. Lauréats du prix ALEF, sur le site Prix-littéraires.net
  7. "Page de présentation du documentaire, sur le site du producteur". Archived from the original on 2014-02-01. Retrieved 2017-02-07.
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