Interview conducted by Patrick Ferla, journalist.
Swiss writer Bernard Comment studied under Jean Starobinski and Roland Barthes before spending several years in Italy, settling in Tuscany in 1985 and teaching at the University of Pisa for four years. He is the author of numerous novels and won the Prix Goncourt for Short Fiction in 2011 for Tout passe (Christian Bourgois). A co-screenwriter for Alain Tanner and the French translator of Antonio Tabucchi, Comment served as the director of fiction at France Culture from 1999 to 2004. Since then, he has headed the Fiction & Cie collection at Éditions du Seuil.
His latest novel, La ferme du Paradis (Albin Michel, 2024), is a story that moves fluidly between Paris, Nice, Marseille, Doubs, Ajoie, and Lake Geneva. The novel is light yet profound, capturing themes of escape, migration, and intolerance, all set against the backdrop of memory and history. Above all, it is a novel of love, deeply tied to the memory of places and the passage of time.
