The youngest of the talent grant winners in 2000, François-Xavier Molia has already followed an astonishingly rich literary path: a first novel, Fourbi, published by Gallimard (Blanche collection, 2000) and four short stories published by Editions Le Monde and Mercure de France (winning the Young Writer's prize three times), as well as a solid foundation in literature (the second-year preparatory class in humanities for entrance to France's elite universities, a Master's in French literature, a postgraduate diploma and studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon).

The thing that first strikes you about him is his curiosity about books and their authors and his intense interest in words (he wrote his thesis on the occurrence of obsolete words in the works of François Rabelais and Georges Perec.) Above all, he seems to have "digested" his words: having learned them gives François-Xavier the freedom to pick them up and play with them to serve his imagination, often in an offbeat, crazy, absurd way. Fourbi, his first novel, tells the story of the Inquisition revisited in modern times and its victim, an assiduous reader at the Beaubourg library in Paris, against a backdrop of a host of characters who are portrayed in a deliberately parodic manner in consciously intricate situations. The same tone, setting and structure are found again in the outline for his new novel, Zéro Dragon. Around the main plot – Marin's desire for vengeance – are a number of parallel stories, which weave the same motifs: secrecy, compromising one's principles, ignoring history’s lessons, the comedy of language, and so on. There may be allusions to Freud, Stalin and Princess Diana, but even these are distorted and treated as either insignificant or absurd. Finally, the author's rewritings echo Marin's own act of plagiarism (sleep tinged with hints of Proust, Quéneau-style variations, tropisms à la Nathalie Sarraute and a page with no letter ‘e’) and provide ample evidence of the work he admires. He describes his novel as being "designed like a fresco, built around a farewell to the century." It is to be read between the lines, then, as both an homage to literature and a satirical view of the times.

Achievements since winning the grant
In 2001, François-Xavier directed the short film Avec Vautours. In 2004, Supplément aux mondes inhabités was published by Gallimard and followed by the publication of Le Contraire du lieu, also by Gallimard, in 2005.