This year, the Mazamet book fair will bring together around thirty authors, including Françoise Dax-Boyer, at the Halle de Mazamet on Sunday, September 15 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“The book and the youth universe” theme of this third edition. Publishers, authors, animations, workshops or independent booksellers, the program is dense for this third edition.
Among the authors present, Françoise Dax-Boyer for her bilingual book “Leila, the queen of wild cats.” “When my granddaughter Elsa was 7 years old, my friend, the writer Michel Tournier, who lived in Choisel, in a presbytery with an extraordinary garden, which he himself described in an initiatory text “Amandine or the two gardens”, gave her a delightful kitten named Leila which means night in Arabic. It is from this gift that I wrote this tale, which is a hymn to freedom.”
An agrégée in literature, Françoise Dax-Boyer has written a dozen poetic works and an epistolary novel. “The action takes place on the Bassin d’Arcachon, in a fishing village, Piraillan, where Elsa spends her holidays. Everything goes wonderfully well until the evening when Leila no longer answers her calls. When she returns for Christmas, her friend the old fisherman tells her that Leila was not dead but that she had become the queen of the wild cats, free. To borrow Kipling’s phrase, she is the one who goes away all alone, along the wet paths of the Wild Woods.”
His latest book “Voyage, voyage”, illustrated by Christian Broutin, was published in 2023 by Éditions du Palais.
“What’s wonderful is that my daughter Elsa Dax-Kerr, who is a painter in London, illustrated this tale. It’s a rare mother-daughter work, which I really care about!”
The program
From 10 am to 6 pm, the thread of words workshop: playing with words and images. 10:30 am and 4 pm, Kamishibai: small traveling theater. 11 am and 2 pm, a drawing workshop and a competition hosted by Paul Foursin. 11 am and 4 pm, a storytelling walk with Grégoire Albisetti. 3 pm and 5 pm, children’s theater with Michèle Orio. 6 pm, drawing competition prize-giving and raffle draw.
