As a young child, even before she could read, Carole Ohana always loved books as objects. When she turned eight, she asked for a dictionary, “the biggest book I knew about," she recalls. Unhappy with her literature studies, she left to work as an au pair with an Irish family. The experience was a revelation: it made her realize that she wanted to work with children. When she returned to her hometown of Lyon, she applied for a position as a youth worker at a preschool. She set up two libraries there, developed book-related activities and organized sales while training to become a preschool teacher. Later, she spent two years as a teacher in a parents’ cooperative day-care centre. She focused on book-related activities there, too, in particular on albums for her very young charges and their parents. She wanted to take special training in reading and asked the parents to pay for her studies, but they turned her down. That’s when Ohana and her partner, a special education teacher, started to work on developing a joint project: setting up a bookstore that focused more on activities than book sales. They found space in a pedestrian street in Pentes, a working-class neighbourhood of Lyon, and tried to convince the bankers, one of which eventually signed on. The business, A Titre d’Aile, opened on May 18, 2006. The two still didn’t have the resources they needed for all the activities they wanted to organize, so the Lagardère grant comes at just the right time.

AGE: 33 I PASSIONS: books, theatre, piano and singing. I PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE: sharing and generosity. I GOALS: to pursue a project that both supports my family and me and focuses on other people. I HER FAVOURITE BOOKSTORES: L’Herbe Rouge and Le Chat Pitre in Paris and A Pleine Page in Lyon.