A sinologist, anthropologist of religions, and expert in Taoism, Sandrine Chenivesse spent twenty years living in China. Her academic articles and lectures at top institutions reflect the depth of her research. Today, she works as a transgenerational psychoanalyst and devotes herself to writing.
In the 1990s, then a young ethnologist, she embarked on an extraordinary journey: on the banks of the Yangzi River, in a village at the foot of Mount Fengdu, she explored the “City of the Bad Death” in search of the last masters of ancient rituals—rites through which the living could cross into the afterlife to reunite with their dead.
Faced with the silence of the villagers, a life-altering incident abruptly halted her momentum, plunging her into a liminal world—and an initiation that would shape her deeply. It would take her twenty years to complete The Fortress of the Dead Souls (La Forteresse des âmes mortes, Actes Sud, 2024).
In French.
