Fréville was trained as a town planner. After completing his studies at the Sorbonne, he was employed as day worker in a centre for drug addicts in Versailles. “This experience brought me a sense of personal enrichment that you can’t find anywhere else.” He then served as recorder for the State Planning Commission before joining the economic development firm pH Group as a regional analyst.

His first publication, Lettres Mortelles, is an epistolary novel published in 1998 by Editions Zero Heure. The novel is composed of six letters and a genealogical tree through which the reader can follow four generations of the same family from the 1960s to the middle of the 21st century. The letters attest to humans’ inability to communicate among themselves and reflect their profound sense of anxiety. Also in 1998, the same publisher released Meurtre au Bois Dormant, a medieval farce in a strange dialect recounting the adventures of a serial-killer Prince Charming. Fréville claims, “I don’t read, except for magazines. I am very suspicious of books. Films are my thing.”

Achievements since winning the grant

Between 2001 and 2002, he served as a development volunteer at the Ubucut school in Kigali, Rwanda (working by turns as a teacher and a teaching supervisor).

Between 2003 and 2004, he worked as project manager for qualitative studies at Teleos (in Paris).

In 2005, he worked as a market research manager for Prophares in Basel, Switzerland, and then in 2006 at GFK in Lausanne. In 2005, he published the novel Comment Sauver l’Afrique en 15 Jours (How To Save Africa In 15 Days), opus 15 (Flammarion 2005).

And coming soon: the novel Figure Parmi les Morts, opus 16, to be published by Flammarion in 2007.