Édouard Louis

How a fearless young man from the working class French provinces transformed himself through his confronting novels, overcoming extreme homophobia, fighting Parisian intellectual disdain and making himself, at 31, one of the most talked-about intellectuals in France today.

Édouard Louis's first creative act was to reinvent himself - discarding his given name and becoming one of France's most exciting and consequential writers today. His autobiographical novels cover his unbearable childhood in a working-class French town (The End of Eddy), a graphic description of his rape (History of Violence) his ultimate understanding that the father who had rejected him was brought to an early death by France's brutal industrial system (Who Killed My Father) and, a moving appreciation of how his mother, inspired by her son, transformed herself (A Woman's Battles and Transformations).

In his first appearance in Sydney Édouard Louis will engage in a conversation that will delight and charm, as well as challenge our easy assumptions about class, the progressive left, and art's duty to confront and make us uncomfortable.