Contact us

Head of Rights

Thomas Guillaume

For Asian, German, Dutch, Greek, Middle Eastern, North African, Russian, Scandinavian, Turkish, UK and US inquiries

Foreign Rights Manager

Francys Zambrano Yánez

For Brazilian, Eastern Europe, Italian, Portuguese, South American and Spanish inquiries

Rights Assistant

Marie Foucault

Dear friends,

Here we are again for a new literary season!

This Spring, we will be at the London Book Fair. Do not hesitate to reach out, should you wish to schedule a meeting.

Meanwhile, we are delighted to reveal our Spring 2022 Non-Fiction Rights List.

You can also have a look at our Spring 2022 Fiction Rights List.

Please feel free to write to us for more material and information.

We very much look forward to meeting you soon!

The Rights Team

HIGHLIGHTS

A Life For Picasso

Brigitte Benkemoun

Art - May 2022 - 252 pages

Option in China (Guangxi Normal UP), Czech Republic (Grada), Denmark (Mellemgaard), Germany (BTB/Random House), Italy (Skira), Korea (Bokbokseoga), Spain (Taurus/Penguin Random House, WSL), Russia (AST).

An inquiry based on unpublished documents about Picasso’s most mysterious and secret muse.

When Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter one winter’s evening in Paris, he asked her to sit for him. From there she falls madly in love before being abandoned once her daughter Maya was born. Even though she marked the most dazzling, ebullient and erotic phase of the Picasso’s career, he always tried to keep her hidden.  

The author reveals the story of a woman who spent fifty years in the shadow of a tyrant even though her body is exhibited in the world’s greatest museums.

The author

Brigitte Benkemoun is a journalist and writer. She is the author of La Petite Fille sur la photo (Fayard, 2012) and Albert le Magnifique (Stock, 2016), and her last book, Je suis le carnet de Dora Maar (Stock, 2019), was translated into nine languages.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

Mozart Was a Woman

Aliette de Laleu

Music/Women's Studies - February 2022 - 288 pages

Rights sold to Korea (Les Mots).

Paying homage to prodigiously talented female musicians who have been left in the shadows.

“Forsake your triumphs that don’t suit your sex and make way for your brother,” were the words of Fanny Mendelssohn’s father. Her compositions were already being signed by her brother Felix. 

Have you heard of Kassia of Constantinople, the first female composer in history whose scores have been identified? Destined to marry Emperor Theophilos, she insolently spurned him to devote herself to music and religion. The saint and Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen corresponded with emperors and popes but found time to compose sacred hymns recognised as leading lights of medieval music. Barbara Strozzi, she of the scandalous reputation, was Italy’s most prolific female baroque composer. Composers, instrumentalists, orchestra directors, founders of ensembles, patrons… this book finally shines a spotlight on these women.

The author

Aliette de Laleu is a journalist who specialises in classical music. In her unmissable weekly piece for France’s top music radio station, she dismantles clichés and talks feminism.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“A fascinating narrative where virtuosity and audacity have pride of place.”
Rolling Stone
“This book reminds us of our unjust ignorance of the role women played in the history of classical music.”
Elle

MYTHS & MYTHOLOGY

Tristan & Iseult

Michel Zink

Literature/Middle Ages - January 2022 - 198 pages

Rights sold to Korea (Korea University Press).

What do Tristan and Iseult tell us about our contemporary romantic ideals?

Michel Zink delves into this medieval legend and reveals the questions, reservations and enthusiasms it has aroused over the centuries. Tristan and Iseult loved each other with all their lives, to the death. They incarnated romantic passion in its purest state. But what sort of love can it have been between two addicts who mistakenly drank what medieval poems refer to as “poison”? A love that sabotaged duty and loyalty? Lovers who were cunning, sly and sometimes cruel?

By exploring this seminal medieval myth, Michel Zink delivers a fascinating essay that questions our present-day concepts of love.

The author

Michel Zink is a specialist of medieval literature, a philologist and a professor of literature. His publications include Bienvenue au Moyen-Âge (2015) and Livres anciens, lecture vivante (2010). He is a member of the Académie française.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“This essay is incredibly relevant today, and even quite subversive.”
L'Obs
“Zink is the professor you have always dreamed about.”
Le Figaro Magazine
“A series worthy of the most creative Netflix shows.”
Le Journal du Dimanche

Free as a Greek Goddess

Laure de Chantal

Non Fiction/Feminism - February 2022 - 252 pages

What if mythology were feminist?

Ancient societies can easily be described as macho, but their mythology paints a very different picture. It depicts smart sorceresses such as Medea and Circe; wise householders such as Penelope; indomitable warriors like the Amazons; and many goddesses – and all of them are examples of culture and creativity. The reader will find, against all expectations, that women in mythology were sometimes far freer than those of today, and will delight in the sheer beauty of their stories. Released from the shackles of cliché, these female figures are glorious, fundamental role models for our time to be handed on to men and women of the future. They encourage us to be humanist, in other words feminist.

The author

Laure de Chantal graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds the prestigious “agrégation” teaching qualification for classics. She has several books to her name.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“A lesson on liberty given by the ancients”
Libération
“#MythsToo”
Le Monde des Livres
“Mythology reconsidered from the angle of a liberated feminism”.
Le Point

SOCIO-POLITICAL COMMITMENT

Cases of Police Brutality

Remedium

Non Fiction/Graphic Novel - January 2022 - 96 pages

An activist graphic reportage that gives a voice to victims of police violence.

On December 1, 2018, eighty-year-old Zineb is about to close the shutters in her apartment when she’s killed by a tear gas grenade. The official report concludes that her death was accidental.

On January 3, 2020, Cédric, 42, is stopped and fined for driving offences. Tempers fray and Cédric ends up handcuffed and pinned to the ground by three officers. As he lies face down, he has a cardiac arrest.

In twenty striking portraits, Remedium condemns the impunity enjoyed by the forces of law and order, and the discrimination and abuses of power displayed by people entrusted to represent the state and protect its citizens. The author has chosen to give a voice to their victims, to set out their version of events, highlighting just how systematic police racism and violence are. Because incidents of police violence can no longer be seen as isolated incidents, exceptions, but genuinely everyday occurrences.

The author

Remedium is a schoolteacher in the Paris suburbs and an illustrator. He is the author of several previous graphic works such as Cas d’école, which condemns the French school system.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“Twenty installments that draw the typical profile of a victim of police brutality”
Le Parisien
“A fierce will to call out violations of basic human rights”
Page

"My Night in a Museum" Series

An author is invited to spend a whole night in a museum and writes afterward a book on his/her experience.

The Painter Devouring the Female Nude

Kamel Daoud

Art/Essay - October 2018 - 220 pages

Picasso Museum

Rights sold to Germany (Kiwi), Italy (La Nave di Teseo), Korea (Mujintree), the Netherlands (Ambo/Anthos), Taiwan (Utopie) and Morocco (Virgule Editions, French language).

One of the greatest Arabic writers revisits the theme of nudes, desire and women.

Kamel Daoud spent a night alone in the Picasso Museum, a singular experience that inspired him to write this essay in which he juxtaposes the image of a female nude with the painter and a Jihadist. To Picasso, a woman was a body that could be truly captured only in terms of desire and erotic associations. The nude is also like a self-portrait imprinted on his subject’s flesh. In fact, she devours him, like a cannibal. But how does a Jihadist view this painting? In his view, the woman painted by Picasso is a scandalous anticipation of dream woman who awaits him in paradise, when he dies. She therefore incites disobedience and sin.

For the former, she evokes dying of desire. For the latter, killing desire itself or dying in order to satisfy it.

The author

Kamel Daoud was born in Algeria in 1970. He grew up in the village of Mesra near Oran. He is a columnist for Le Point, and Le Quotidien d’Oran, and a contributor to The New York Times and El País. His previous books include the bestseller The Meursault Investigation which has been published in translation across the world.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“The writer had never revealed so much about himself”
Le Figaro Littéraire
“A sharp-edged, sparking reverie about women and desire”
Le Point
“A seductive and subversive text which examines our relationship to Art and the body from two different sides of the Mediterranean”
Leila Slimani, L'Obs

Walk on till the Evening

Lydie Salvayre

Art/Narrative - April 2019 - 224 pages

Picasso Museum

Rights sold to Korea (Mujintree) and Spain (El Desvelo).

With Giacometti’s statue The Walking Man as a starting point, the 2014 Goncourt winner undertakes an emotional re-exploration of her indignation and her family’s story as the daughter of a Spanish exile.

Lydie Salvayre spent a whole night alone at the Picasso Museum during its Picasso-Giacometti exhibition. Having had a lasting passion for The Walking Man (a work that she sees as the very essence of art but had only previously seen photographed in magazines), she was sure to be profoundly moved when confronted with so much beauty. And yet, seeing this “motionless, frozen but also moving body, like a waves at sea that the cold has frozen the swell” produces only mild irritation in her.

Is she illiterate in beauty? Is this sensibility passed on only among the well-to-do to reinforce their exclusivity? Unless the space is cramping the piece and robbing it of its profound message? Between the lines – as the author reveals her relationship with her father, her family of exiled Spanish communists, her obsession with humility and the denunciation anchored within every injustice – the reader gradually discovers her demanding expectations of art and her fear of death. A powerful, full-blooded read

The author

Lydie Salvayre has written some twenty books, translated into many languages, including Pas pleurer which won the 2014 prix Goncourt (300,000 copies sold).

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“A book of rare power”
François Busnel La Grande Librairie
“A text of unusual strength and intellectual honesty”
Le JDD
“An aesthetic, cultural and social lesson given with hothead generosity”
Le Soir

Spanish Night

Adel Abdessemed & Christophe Ono-dit-Biot

Art/Narrative - October 2019 - 224 pages, 23 illustrations

Picasso Museum

Rights sold to Italy (La Nave di Teseo) and Korea (Mujintree)

Two contemporary artists are on a quest for Picasso’s legendary work, Guernica. A book that celebrates art and friendship.

Adel Abdessemed and Christophe Ono-dit-Biot are invited to the Guernica exhibition at the Picasso Museum for one night. Paradoxically, the centrepiece of the exhibition is absent because it can no longer leave Spanish soil. Armed respectively with chalk and a pen, they set out to find precursors of the Guernica in the other paintings exhibited.

But the missing work soon refers the artist back to his own story in Algeria: he spent his childhood with a charcoal pencil in his hand and hasn’t stopped drawing since, but had to flee to express his indomitable freedom from any form of power, be it political or religious. 

The authors

Born in Algeria, Adel Abdessemed is an artist exhibited worldwide from Moma in New York to the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot is a journalist, deputy editorial director of Le Point and a prize-winning novelist. His books include Birmane (Winner of the Prix Interallié), Plonger (Grand Prix of the Académie Française), and Croire au merveilleux.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“It is a book on creative madness, on the encounter of words and images, and also on friendship”
Le Figaro
“An exhilarating book”
Libération
“Spanish Night is an ode to liberty, to rebellion”
GQ

A Lesson from the Shadows

Léonor de Récondo

Art/Narrative - January 2020 - 160 pages

El Greco Museum

Rights sold to Korea (Mujintree) and Spain (Minuscula)

A dreamlike night in the private world of the great master of the Spanish School at the El Greco Museum in Toledo.

During a dreamlike night, Léonor de Recondo looks for the most original painter of the Sixteenth Century: Dominikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco, in his museum in Toledo.

In this overheated museum which recreates the artist’s home, her heart beats faster. While she waits to meet the artist, she plays the violin, admires his poorly lit paintings emerging from the shadows, and collates snatches of the painter’s little-known life story. 

Will El Greco, who died in in 1614, be there to meet her?

The author

Writer and violinist Léonor de Récondo has recorded some fifteen albums and published six novels, including Amours (winner of the Prix des Libraires and the Prix RTL/Lire) and Point cardinal (winner of the Prix du Roman France-Culture/Télérama).

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“Only few people have written so sensitively about El Greco”
Le Figaro Littéraire
“Léonor de Récondo is a genuine storyteller”
Libération
“Exhilarating”
ELLE

There Is Only One Love

Santiago H. Amigorena

Art/Narrative - March 2020 - 128 pages

Picasso Museum

Santiago Amigorena’s love letter to paintings and the woman he loves.

There’s only one love.

Or rather, is there only one love? Do we mean the same love with reference to a painting as to another person? What’s the score with love? Santiago Amigorena wonders. 

Deep in a sleeping museum, questions become statements, and statements questions. Clinging resolutely to the thread of love, Amigorena waits through sleep and dreams for the paintings to guide him and give him answers. During this night of enforced solitude – peopled by Picasso, Giacometti or perhaps Vermeer and Bataille – he gently but in great depth explores love, writing, art and the inextricable links between them.

The author

Born in Buenos Aires in 1962, Santiago H. Amigorena is an Argentine writer, director, screenwriter and producer who lives in France. His books are published by P.O.L. His tenth novel, Le Ghetto intérieur, was a renowned success in France and was sold all over the world.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“What a wonderful book!”
Le Point
“Splendid!”
ELLE
“A magnificent love letter”
Madame Figaro

Behind Closed Doors With Picasso

Enki Bilal

Art/Narrative - June 2020 - 96 pages, illustrated

Picasso Museum

A supernatural night at the Picasso Museum for Enki Bilal, one of the greatest and most popular creators of comic books.

What is this strange ultra-powerful hand picking up Enki Bilal in the middle of the night and putting him on a camp bed? And what is this mysterious, haunted place where he ends up?

During his hallucinatory exploration, Enki Bilal meets not only personalities from Picasso’s life, his muses and models, but also the great master himself and his idol Goya. His wanderings through the corridors of the Picasso Museum take the form of a waking dream, allowing us to touch the painter’s work in a captivating, sensual way, culminating in the epiphany of the master’s great work, Guernica.

The author

Enki Bilal, to use his pen name, was born in Belgrade on 7th October 1951. In Serbo-Croat and French, his family name is Enes Bilanovic. He creates, writes and illustrates comic books in French. He works partly in the realms of science fiction and tackles themes of time and memory. In 1987 he was awarded the Grand Prix at Angoulême Comics Festival.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“A fantastic and sensual night”
Le Monde des Livres
“A literary gem”
Le Figaro Littéraire
“A brilliant writing”
Le Temps

Ephemeral

Bernard Chambaz

Art/Narrative - September 2020 - 128 pages

Franco Maria Ricci Museum

A night in the world’s largest maze surrounded by works of art at the Franco Maria Ricci Museum in Parma.

Franco Maria Ricci founded the prestigious FMR magazine and the Labirinto della Masone in Parma where his art collections are housed. Next to it he grew the bamboo maze which is the largest maze in the world.  

Over one night, Bernard Chambaz comes across many individuals whose lives build his narrative. Franco Maria Ricci himself, first young then aging, arousing subtle feelings of tenderness. The writers who gave him texts, such as Borgès, Giono and Zavattini. Donizetti whose skullcap was stolen during his autopsy. Clelia Marchi, a 72-year-old peasant woman who chronicled history in ink on her bridal sheet. The luxury shoemaker Ferragamo who started as a small-time cobbler. And so many others.  

The author

The novelist, poet and historian Bernard Chambaz won the 1993 Goncourt Prize for a debut novel for L’Arbre de vies (F. Bourin), and the 2014 prix Jouvenel from the Académie française and the sporting literature Grand prix for Dernières nouvelles du martin-pêcheur (Flammarion).

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“Thank you, Bernard Chambaz, for perpetuating such beauty”
France Inter
“A marvelous storyteller”
L'humanité Dimanche

A Smell of Flowers in the Night

Leïla Slimani

Art/Narrative - January 2021 - 120 pages

Punta Della Dogana Museum

Over 90.000 copies sold.

Rights sold to Germany (Luchterhand), Brazil (Casa dos Livros), Portugal (Objectiva), Italy (La Nave di Teseo), Korea (Mujintree), Slovakia (Inaque), Spain (Cabaret Voltaire), Taiwan (Ecus), UK (Hodder) and USA (Mobius)

Leïla Slimani, winner of the 2016 prix Goncourt, doesn’t like leaving home and prefers solitude to entertainment. So why agree to spend a sleepless night in the Punta della Dogona Museum in Venice?

Reflecting upon the “impossibility” of a book whilst subtly digressing in the Venetian night, Leila Slimani talks about herself, about imprisonment, intimacy, identity, being caught in the middle, between East and West.

A discreet, sensitive confession in which the author mentions her father who was once imprisoned.

But this book – with its intensity and inner fire – is also about beauty disappearing and how urgently we must make the most of it. It is about the glory of the ephemeral.  

At dawn, although awake and alert, the author emerges from the building as if from a dream, and all that is left of her night is the smell of flowers.  

The author

Leïla Slimani was born in 1981. She has written three acclaimed novels published by Gallimard, including Lullaby, which won the 2016 Prix Goncourt, was sold to 44 countries and has sold over a million copies in France.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“After the overwhelming success of Lullaby and Le Pays des autres, the novelist opens a more intimate parenthesis”
Télérama
“Breathtaking beauty and strength”
Les Inrockuptibles
“A divine surprise”
Le Figaro Littéraire

Muses Never Sleep

Zoé Valdès

Art/Narrative - June 2021 - 224 pages

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Rights sold to Spain (Thyssen Museum

The expression “dead painting” is used by French auctioneers for works that can’t be authenticated…

When she visits the galleries of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Zoé Valdés finds herself immersed in a half-fantasy, half-real world. She takes us with her in her pursuit of two muses and two famous painters, Balthus and Bonnard.

The first part of the novel introduces a young model who poses for Balthus, playing cat and mouse with the master who painted “Passage du commerce Saint-André”. Who’s looking at who? Who wants who? Does art produce dreams in a semi-conscious state or scorching reality?

The second part shows us another muse, Renée de Monchaty, the lover idealised by Pierre Bonnard in “Femme à sa toilette” who, broken-hearted, took her own life in 1925.

The muses are young women, sometimes teenagers, innocents sacrificed on the altar of the painters’ desire. In this sensual, sleep-walking narrative tinged with Latin American-style magic realism, truth and illusion intertwine like poisonous flowers.

The author

Born in Havana in May 1959, Zoé Valdés is a novelist, poet and filmmaker, as well as a known figure within the opposition to the Cuban political regime. She found asylum Paris in 1995 following the publication of her controversial book Le Néant quotidien. Winner of the 1996 Prix Planeta, she has written many books, including La Douleur du dollar.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here

The Sky Inside Us

Jakuta Alikavazovic

Narrative Non-Fiction/Art - September 2021 - 160 pages

The Louvre Museum

 Prix Médicis-Essay 2021

Rights sold to Germany (Carl Hanser Verlag) and the US (Fern Books)

Jakuta Alikavazovic at the Louvre! Intimately surrounded by classic masterpieces, she reveals her roots.  

Imagine a night alone with the greatest treasures in French heritage. The novelist spent this night wandering around the Ancient World sections, with a bag slung across her shoulders containing, amongst other things, an illicit bar of nougat. This personal and original book is peopled with nocturnal shadows and ghosts of the past, and the glide of bare feet past the Venus de Milo.  

But Alikavazovic soon explains her intention: “I came here tonight to become my father’s daughter again.” Her father was born in 1951, in a village in Montenegro, which was then part of Yugoslavia. Without a word of French, he came to Paris out of love, to escape, and to see the Louvre. He sees the museum as a city within a city. This exiled father, a scavenger-aesthete, once strolled casually around the Louvre with his daughter Jakuta and asked her, “So, how would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa?”  

The author

A novelist and translator of English born in 1979, Jakuta Alikavazovic won the 2008 Prix Goncourt for a first novel for Corps volatilsLa Blonde et le Bunker received a special merit in the Prix Wepler. Her most significant translations have been into English with Granta. 

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“The author excels in probing the mysteries of the nocturnal world, of art and of our sensitive and tenacious memory”
Les Inrocks
“A very joyous and personal text”
Télérama
“A shimmering narrative”
Le Figaro Littéraire

The Titanic Ark

Éric Chevillard

Narrative Non Fiction/Art - January 2022 - 176 pages

Museum of Natural History

Éric Chevillard spends a night in the hall for extinct and threatened species at the Paris Natural History Museum.

The place is frightening, exotic and very inspiring for writing. Between his wanderings and contemplations, the author imagines being a saviour for these lost worlds. He encourages us to think about these extinct species and the conservation of the human race, raising a question at the heart of modern-day concerns: what is our place on this earth and what is our relationship with nature and other animals? He claims that “To resuscitate lost species, rather than the uncertainties of cloning, wouldn’t it be wiser to put our faith in poetry?”

With its sublime writing, this book takes an inventive look at preserving threatened species.

The author

Éric Chevillard first came to public attention in the 80s as one of the “minimalist” writers at Les Editions de Minuit, alongside Jean Echenoz, Jean-Philippe Toussaint and François Bon. His work is characterised by its subverting of narrative conventions and its quirky humour; it has earned widespread critical acclaim and has been translated into 12 languages. His most famous books include Mourir m’enrhume (1987), La Nébuleuse du crabe (1993) and Vaillant Petit Tailleur (2004). Since 2007, he has written a literary blog called L’Autofictif.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
“Both melancholic and burlesque”
L'Obs
“We laugh, revel in these inspired puns, but cackle and shiver at the same time”
Le Monde des Livres

The National Museum

Diane Mazloum

Narrative Non Fiction/Art - March 2022 - 176 pages

National Museum of Beirut

Rights sold to Lebanon (Librairie Antoine, French language)

Diane Mazloum spends a night in the National Museum of Beirut, the only national commemorative building in this fragile, divided nation.

The National Museum of Beirut stands on what was the murderous frontier between East and West Beirut during the civil war that lasted 15 years – if it can even be said to have ended.

How did this temple which harbours the treasures of vanished civilisations – from the Egyptians to the Babylonians and the Byzantines to the Mamluks – survive mankind’s brutal assaults?

During her close brush with this sediment of historical material, this confetti of bygone empires, Diane Mazloum comes to understand that the past shapes the present, and the shadows of the dead are cast over the living and inform who they are.

The author

Diane Mazloum was born in Paris and grew up in Rome. She is Lebanese and is the author of several books, including Beyrouth, la nuit (2014, Stock), L’Âge d’or (2018, JC Lattès) and Une piscine dans le désert (2020, JC Lattès), all of which were shortlisted for literary prizes.

Download the material

Find out more

Click here
"Fascinating."
ELLE
A declaration of love to her broken country."
Geo Histoire
"Diane Mazloum turns this museum into an emblem of resistance."
L'Obs

Pourquoi collectons-nous vos données ?

Les données que vous consentez à transmettre à HACHETTE LIVRE, destinataire et responsable de leur traitement (HACHETTE LIVRE - DPO – 58 rue Jean Bleuzen – 92170 Vanves), sont hébergées conformément au dispositif EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, permettent la gestion de votre abonnement, et sont conservées pour sa seule durée. Si vous êtes déjà abonné auprès d’autres éditeurs du groupe, elles seront partagées avec ces derniers. Vous pouvez demander l’accès, la rectification, la suppression et la portabilité de vos données ici , définir des directives post mortem les concernant ou vous adresser à une autorité de contrôle. Vous pouvez retirer votre consentement au traitement de ces données, ce qui mettra fin à votre abonnement.
Les informations que nous collectons nous permettront de vous proposer des contenus personnalisés et adaptés en fonction de votre profil.
Tout savoir sur les données personnelles