Claire Legendre

Claire Legendre is a writer and professor at the University of Montreal. Villa Medici fellow in 1999–2000, she is the author of a dozen books published in France and Québec, including Viande, Making-of, L’écorchée vive, La méthode Stanislavski, Bermudes, Le Nénuphar et l’araignée, and Ce désir me point (2024). Through her work, she explores the autobiographical pact across various artistic forms, addressing testimony and intermediality, female identity, and migration. She directed the collective Nullipares (2020), created the podcast Translations (2025), and made a feature-length documentary for cinema, Bermudes Nord (2018).

At Villa Medici, Claire Legendre will write a self-reflexive novel about her journey as a young writer at the turn of the century, grappling with the sexism of the Parisian literary world at a time when feminism was not in vogue. She explores the figure of the “young woman writer” performing herself across generations, generating a kind of provocative aura of which she is both the agent and the object. From Sylvia Plath to Nelly Arcan, before the word “écrivaine” even entered the dictionary, to today’s authors whose voices express hard-won confidence and claimed vulnerability — can the young woman writer escape the paradoxical expectations that define her condition?