Respectable Occupation

Julia Kerninon was born in 1987 and holds a Ph.D in American Literature. She has been compared to French New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer for her sense of style and feeling for dialogue, and to Alain Resnais for the artful structure of her narratives. But, most of all, her work stands out for its contagious joy, drive, exuberance. Her first novel, Buvard, has won the Prix Francoise Sagan, among many other awards. Kerninon's second novel, Le dernier amour d'Attila Kiss, won the Prix de la Closerie des Lilas in 2016, and her latest novel, My Devotion, winner of the 2018 Feneon Literary Prize, is published by Europa Editions on 20 August 2020. She lives in Nantes.

'Borne along by Kerninon's long, joyful sentences (nimbly translated by Ruth Diver), it's a winning account of her journey from reader to writer.' - Francesca Carington, Tatler (Best Books of Summer 2020); 'A loose but very charming longform essay about writing and being a writer (...) In the anecdotal and at times very funny prose of A Respectable Occupation we follow Kerninon's childhood fascination with bookshops, her obsessive consumption and production of words' - Robert Greer, The Idler; 'A female manifesto for a writer's life (...) a lyrical reminder of the hard (and indeed often unrelated) work it takes to be a wordsmith, which is justified daily in the joy of putting pen to paper and writing book after book.' - Mia Colleran, The Irish Times; 'Marvellously contagious.' - Le Point; 'Julia Kerninon lays down sentences as definitive as dictums, impresses with her maturity of style and command of narrative. The reader plunges in, with the same voraciousness she puts into her writing.' - ELLE (France)