"I'm not an author! Being an author isn't a career. I'm a journalist…but I don't feel like I'm working. Journalism is not a job, it's a luxury." So says Yann, an exuberant man with green, uncompromising eyes. He’s a die-hard – and even he recognizes it, with a hint of self-satisfaction: "I have every fault. My only quality is never giving up on anything." This perseverance led him to write his first book, Jubilations Vers le Ciel, which was a great success when it was published by Grasset in 1996: it won the Goncourt Prize for a first novel and the François Mauriac prize from the Académie Française. More than 15,000 copies were sold in all. What is Yann's secret? Does he really have one? "I write at full speed. I only put the punctuation in afterward. I ignore everything that has come before, and write with complete freedom, without worrying about my readers… In fact, I write very rarely. I write in my head, and then I write it out." Between assignments for l’Express, l’Evénement du Jeudi and Max, a column on France Inter and a weekly "cultural" appearance on Paris Première, Yann, a graduate of the Reims Management School and of Sciences Po Paris, nevertheless found time to write a second novel, Dernières Nouvelles de l’Amour, published in 1997 by Grasset.

Achievements since winnning the grant

In 1997, his novel Les Cimetières Sont des Champs de Fleurs, sponsored by the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation, was published by Grasset.
In 2000, Yann published Anissa Corto with Grasset and produced the short film Grand Oral with Olivier Delbosc (1996 Producer grant-winner).
In 2002, he published Podium with Grasset.
In 2004, he worked with Arthur-Emmanuel Pierre (1996 Producer grant-winner) to write and produce Podium, a film based on his novel. The same year, he published Partouz, a novel, and Transfusion, a poetry anthology, with Grasset.
His novel, Panthéon, was released in bookstores in the fall of 2006. The book tells the story of the young Yann, who, to face up to his destiny and escape his fate as a martyred child beaten by his parents, invents his own, very special "pantheon" that will help him survive in his provincial cesspool. It comprises a mish-mash of the book's true heroes: Péguy (from Orléans, like Yann) as well as Sacha Guitry, Roberto Rossellini, Edith Stein, Thérèse de Lisieux, Jean-Paul Marat and a certain François Mitterrand. Each of these figures takes turns serving as the inspiration for the "mini-novels" sprinkled throughout the larger novel, in which Yann's dizzying, Celine-scented style works wonders.