Jake Lamar
Jake Lamar signing at the 7th Interpol'Art Festival in Reims , in October 2012.
Jake Lamar signing at the 7th Interpol'Art Festival in Reims , in October 2012.
Born1961 (age 62–63)
The Bronx, New York City
NationalityAmerican
Alma materHarvard University

Jake Lamar (born in 1961 in The Bronx, New York City) is an African-American writer, novelist, playwright, and cultural critic[1] living in Paris.[1]

After graduating from Harvard University, Lamar spent six years writing for Time magazine.[2] He has lived in Paris since 1993[3] and teaches creative writing at Sciences Po.[4] At age 30, he published a memoir, Bourgeois Blues, in which he evoked his relationship with his father. With it, he won the Lyndhurst Prize.[4] In 1993, inspired by the American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, he moved to Paris in the 18th arrondissement where he still resides.

After a near fatal heart problem in 2015, Lamar wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times on the quality of the socialist system of health care in France.[5] His most recent work, Viper's Dream (No Exit Press, 2023) is a crime novel set in the jazz world of Harlem between the years 1936 and 1961.[6] A version of Viper's Dream was broadcast (in French) as a 10-episode radio play in 2019. That production included many jazz tracks of the period. Viper's Dream was published in French as a novel by Rivages/Noir in 2021. Viper's Dream was published in the US by Crooked Lane Books on September 19, 2023.

Fiction in English

  • Bourgeois Blues (Summit Books 1991)[4]
  • The Last Integrationist (Crown 1996)[4]
  • Close to the Bone (Crown 1999)
  • If 6 were 9 (Crown 2001)
  • Rendezvous Eighteenth (Minotaur 2003)
  • Ghosts of Saint-Michel (Minotaur 2006)
  • Viper's Dream (No Exit Press 2023)

Fiction in French

  • Le caméléon noir (Rivages/Noir 2003)
  • Nous avions un rêve (Rivages/Noir 2005)
  • New York Transfer (Biro 2007)
  • Rendez-vous dans le 18ème (Rivages/Thriller 2007)
  • Les Fantômes de Saint-Michel (Rivages/Thriller 2009)
  • Confessions d'un fils modèle (Payot/Rivages 2009)
  • Postérité (Rivages 2014)
  • Viper's Dream (Rivages/Noir 2021)

Plays

  • Brothers in Exile
  • Brothers in Exile (radio play)
  • Viper's Dream (radio play)

Awards

  • Lyndhurst Prize (for his first book, Bourgeois Blues)
  • Centre National du Livre grant (for his novel Postérité)
  • France's Grand Prize for best foreign thriller (for his novel The Last Integrationist)
  • Beaumarchais fellowship for his play Brothers in Exile

References

  1. 1 2 The Library of Congress
  2. ↑ Interview with American writer Jake Lamar
  3. ↑ Jake Lamar, le jazz américain, le roman noir et Paris
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Jake Lamar". Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination. Retrieved 2022-05-27.
  5. ↑ TALK BY JAKE LAMAR
  6. ↑ Viper's Dream, No Exit Press
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.