Emmanuel Ruben

Emmanuel Ruben (b. 1980) studied geography at École Normale Supérieure in Lyons and Russian at Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. He is the author of a dozen award-winning novels, short stories and essays which question Europe’s borders, including Sur la Route du Danube (2019), his account of a cycling odyssey from Odessa to Strasbourg, winner of the Prix Nicolas Bouvier; Sabre (2020), awarded the Prix des Deux-Magots, and Les Méditerranéennes (2022), winner of the Prix du Roman Historique. In 2022 he also published Nouvelles Ukrainiennes and directed and translated, with Iryna Dmytrychyn, Hommage à l’Ukraine, a collective volume of Ukrainian authors. Between 2017 and 2021 he was the director of Maison Julien Gracq, a writer’s and artist’s residency.

Théorie des Archipels is a project for a novel built around three essential, not to say vital, elements for anyone wishing to understand Japan: its geological characteristics, its tragic past and its political present. The novel’s three characters – a French geographer, an historian and a Japanese photographer – take up the mantle of Ino Tadataka, the cartographer who produced the first map of Japan and who made 40 million steps in the process. Appointed by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, they must map the 7,237 new islands which Japan discovered in 2023. As they do, they realise that the archipelago’s geography is without end. Spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, this reflection on the connections between geography, art and literature can be read on several levels. It carries on from his previous novels which, for the first time, distance themselves from “Europe with its age-old parapets”.