Jean Hatzfeld
He is the namesake and grandson of the Hellenist, Jean Hatzfeld and the son of Olivier and Maud Hatzfeld, from whom he inherited his passion for travel. Born in Madagascar, the fourth child of a large family, he spent his childhood in Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village in the mountains of Auvergne in the centre of France. His grandparents were deported from France during the Second World War, but survived. Without a doubt, it is for this reason he has read so many books about the Shoah.
Biography
Youth
Just after May 68, he travelled to Kabul and Peshawar; on his return to France he began to work in factories, carrying out various tasks before finally settling in Paris.
Life as a journalist
In 1975, he published his first article in the French daily newspaper Libération where he had begun working as a sports journalist, thus discovering a world that he found romantic and about which he had the pleasure of telling compelling stories. He initiated himself too, in writing stories that were split into episodes and published daily. Finally, he became a reporter in different fields, reporting on a variety of news items, for the most part abroad, in countries such as Israel, Palestine, Poland, Rumania and all over Eastern Europe, both during and after socialism.
His first trip to Beirut immediately decided his vocation of becoming a war correspondent. Over a period of twenty-two years, he has covered many wars, those of Africa and the Middle East, as well as the Croatian and Bosnian war, this last one being the background for his book, L’Air de la guerre, written while he was immobilised in Sarajevo in June 1992 due to an accident.
He has written four novels taken from his own experience of being on war frontlines, La guerre au bord du fleuve, La ligne de flottaison, Où en est la nuit?, as well as Robert Mitchum ne revient pas, inspired by the memories of war, where he goes back to people left by the wayside during his years as a reporter. He also returns in his thoughts to places and restages various war themes, as well as the writings of war. In his last novels, he revisits the world of sport, especially in Deux metres dix, imbued by wars of the past.
After his arrival in Rwanda as a reporter, shortly after the Tutsi genocide, struck by the collective failure of journalists covering the event and their incapacity to face up to the silence of the survivors, he puts his job as a journalist in Paris on hold for four years, in order to live near the swamps and work with the Tutsi survivors of Nyamata, a village in the Bugesera district. He endeavours to lead the reader into the universe of genocide by a different kind of literature. He does not try to understand or make an investigation, but to build and use the narratives of the people who lived through the experience of extermination. The first book, Dans le nu de la vie (Life laid bare: The Survivors in Rwanda speak), was written with the help of fourteen survivors living in the hills of Nyamata. He continues his work with a group of Hutu who took part in the genocide, who lived in the same hills and who were imprisoned in the Rilima penitentiary. As a result of these conversations, in 2003 he published Une saison de machettes (Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda speak). He then wrote a novel, one of the main characters being a war correspondent on his return to Paris.
A third book dealing with the Tutsi genocide, La Stratégie des antilopes (The Strategy of Antelopes), was published in August 2007. A fourth one follows the life of Englebert des collines, an old pal, a survivor of the swamps, a vagabond and alcoholic whom he has known since his first days in Nyamata. In this book, Jean Hatzfeld narrates the passage of time, the life of the protagonists of his first books “after” the genocide, the impossible dialogue between survivors and killers after the latter have left prison, their fears, doubts and lack of understanding, and above all their phantoms. Twenty years after the butchery, he returns to the banks of the swamps to work with the children of the killers and the survivors, who already appeared in his former books, youths who have not experienced the machetes, but who have inherited the memory of them and who share a language consisting of metaphorical and often poetic vocabulary.
Several of his books have been translated into different European and Asian languages, among them English.
He contributed to L’Autre Journal, GEO, Autrement, Rolling Stones, Cahiers du cinéma, Le Monde, Actuel. He has also written for various magazines and collective books in France and abroad (such as The Paris Review and the collection BPI Centre Pompidou); he also acted as a co-author of screen-writings.
Some of his books have been adapted for theatre, plays such as Igishanga, adapted and played by Isabelle Lafon; Une saison de machettes, adapted and staged by Dominique Lurcel; Dans le nu de la vie, directed by Jacques Taroni and produced by France-Culture for the Avignon Festival; Les voix de Nyamata, adapted and staged by Anna Feissel-Leibovici; Exil, adapted, staged and played by Sonia Wieder-Atherton on her cello at the Philharmonie of Paris.
Bibliography
• L’air de la guerre: sur les routes de Croatie et de Bosnie-Herzégovine, récit, Paris, L’Olivier, 1994
• La guerre au bord du fleuve, roman, Paris, L’Olivier, 1999
• Dans le nu de la vie: récits des marais rwandais, Paris, Le Seuil, 2000
• Une saison de machettes, récits, Paris, Le Seuil, 2003
• La ligne de flottaison, roman, Paris, Le Seuil, 2005
• La stratégie des antilopes, the third part about the Tutsi genocide, Paris, Le Seuil, 2007
• Où en est la nuit?, Paris, Gallimard, 2011
• Robert Mitchum ne revient pas, Paris, Gallimard, 2013
• Englebert des collines, the fourth part about the Tutsi genocide, Paris, Gallimard, 2014
• Un papa de sang, the fifth part about the Tutsi genocide, Paris, Gallimard, 2015
• Deux metres dix, Paris, Gallimard, 2018
Participations
• Serge Daney, Petite bibliothèque des Cahiers du Cinéma
• Après-guerre(s), Autrement
• Bosnia (in small part), British Library
• Claude Lanzmann, Un Voyant dans le siècle, Gallimard
• Armistice, Gallimard
Main distinctions
• 1998: prix Bayeux for war correspondents
• 2000: prix France-Culture, for Dans le nu de la vie
• 2003: prix Femina essai, for Une saison de machettes
• 2003: prix Joseph Kessel, for Une saison de machettes
• 2006: The Freedom of Expression Award (category of books), Great-Britain
• 2007: Prix Médicis, for La stratégie des antilopes
• 2010: prix Ryszard-Kapuscinski, at Warsaw, for La stratégie des antilopes' ' • 2011: grand prix de Littérature sportive, for Où en est la nuit?
• 2016: prix Mémoire Albert Cohen, for Un papa de sang