the essential
The inaugural evening of the Letters of Autumn festival will begin on Tuesday, November 19 at 6:30 p.m., at the Olympe de Gouges theater, in Montauban (Tarn-et-Garonne). Agnès Gros, director of Confluences, looks through the program for this 34th edition with us.
To increase fruitful interactions, the 34th Letters of Autumn festival, organized in Montauban (Tarn-et-Garonne) from November 18 to December 1, 2024 by the Confluences association will have two guests of honor this year. Jakuta Alikavazovic and Sylvain Prud’homme will be surrounded by eighty authors, musicians, actors, illustrators, publishers… Both construct, book after book, writings, short stories, translations or chronicles, two singular, cosmopolitan literary universes and sensitive, praised by readers and literary prizes.
Intended for everyone, lovers of letters, curious about new artistic creations, families, young audiences, the program is available in multiple formats: literary meetings, stage readings and shows, cinema, concerts, meetings at share with family. A rich and varied program throughout the department until December 1st. A few days before the launch of the festival, we met Agnès Gros, director of Confluences, who is fine-tuning the final preparations with her team.
Lettres d’Automne is the showcase of Confluences, how does your association live?
More than a showcase, Lettres d’Automne is the heart of Confluences’ activities. The festival mobilizes the professional and volunteer team for several months and allows the association to deploy its commitments on a large scale: forging links around literature, making the voices of authors heard, putting the book on stage, giving food for thought and to dream… However, Confluences is a very active association. Throughout the year, she carries out many other projects, always around reading. This anchor nourishes the festival, and vice versa.
We enjoy working with media libraries, cultural centers or performance halls that know how to create links with residents.
As a programmer, how did you choose your guests?
This choice is primarily a reader’s favorite; several years ago we noticed the books by Jakuta Alikavazovic and Sylvain Prudhomme as being among the most interesting of a generation of writers. We then had the opportunity to meet them and discover two generous, curious personalities, two artists on the way. Asking them to share the poster for these 34th Autumn Letters together was, however, a gamble because they knew each other very little. The way in which they engaged in the project to bring about a common creative space showed that the intuition was good.
Why choose to shine in the department and meet a variety of audiences?
Our territory is rich in cultural actors and we enjoy working with media libraries, cultural centers or performance halls that know how to create links with residents. These partnerships enrich the festival’s programming, which has every interest in reaching out to all readers, but also to non-readers! This year, we want to further highlight this influence in the region by partnering with the cultural carpooling platform Festicar.
It’s up to us to open the doors wide so that young people can feel at home, if only for the time of a meeting with a guest author for Lettres d’Automne.
Reading is losing momentum among young people, can the festival awaken their interest?
I don’t know if the festival can bear this great responsibility alone! But what we are convinced of is that literature is for everyone and that there are a thousand ways to get into books. It’s up to us to open the doors wide so that young people can feel at home, if only for the time of a meeting with a guest author for Lettres d’Automne.
Over time, Autumn Letters evolves, what will be the surprises this year?
This year we will see many authors bring their texts to the stage themselves. It is a trend which goes beyond the framework of Montauban and which testifies to a contemporary literature which is also invented in the giving voice to texts and the crossover with other artists, often musicians. In addition to the presence of novelists, this year we will welcome a historian, a philosopher, authors of travel journals… but also two translators who will allow us to open the program to foreign literature.
Furthermore, the program will give pride of place to cinema, with several screenings (including a ‘genre’ film) and the presence of a director. And of course we don’t forget the conviviality with the Rio’s musical breaks, the bistro and the festival bookstore.
