François Place, Traveler of the Imaginary

Abstract

François Place, Traveler of the Imaginary Christophe Meunier (bio) The work of François Place is at the intersection of documentary and fiction, of historical or geographical reality and the imaginary. Traveler of time and space, the French artist has the gift of taking his readers of all ages through his lines, strokes, and colors into parallel universes. In turn, illustrator, author, and novelist, Place also has the genius of rethinking the very concept of children’s picture books. Born in 1957, to a schoolteacher mother and a mosaic artist father, François Place spent his childhood in Ezanville, a small town located about 20 kilometers north of Paris. He was eleven years old when the Place family moved to Touraine where his grandparents lived. François pursued his secondary studies at Tours. With a literary baccalaureate in hand, he left the Valley of the Loire in 1974, and undertook three years of advanced study in Paris, at the Ecole Estienne, a school of advanced studies for the arts and graphics industries. After graduation, he started out in business [End Page 125] communication, publishing and advertising. In 1983, he began illustrating at Hachette, collaborating on the “Bibliothèque Rose” collection, where he participated in republishing the works of the Countess of Ségur. For Hachette Jeunesse always and for “Le Livre de Poche” collection, he worked with Henriette Bichonnier and Roselyne Morel. In 1985, he met Pierre Marchand, editor at Gallimard Jeunesse, who noticed his drawings for youth. His career as an illustrator seemed to skyrocket from this point. Gallimard entrusted him with the illustration of a series of five documentaries for the “Découverte Cadet” collection, having as a subject the discovery of the world, the great conquerors, explorers and navigators. In 1992, it was Casterman who put their faith in him. They published Les Derniers Géants, the first illustrated work of fiction in which he was both author and illustrator. The book suggests, by its form, a travel journal and tells the story of an English adventurer of the 19th century, Archibald Ruthmore, who having purchased at a port in Sussex a tooth that he was told come from a giant, embarked on a brigantine and left, armed with a map, in search of the last giants. The book was a clear success, receiving three major awards on its release: that of the Salon de Montreuil, the Société des Gens de Lettres, and the Cercle d’Or Livres Hebdo. It was translated into English in 1993 by William Rodarmor, under the title The Last Giants, by the American firm David R. Godine, then into German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. All while continuing to illustrate the work of other children’s authors, Place undertook in 1994, an enormous piece of work which would take six years. The project was to produce an atlas of twenty-six maps from the letters of the alphabet and accompany each with a story of an imaginary country depicted by the map. The world of Atlas des géographes Orbae came to light as three volumes appearing in 1996, 1998, and 2000. The first volume was showered with praise and received the Children’s Book Award from the Geography Book Fair at the International Festival of Geography at Saint-Dié-des-Vosges in 1997, as well as the prize for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair the following year. Six other children’s picture books would follow before François Place started writing youth novels. In 2010, he published with Gallimard Jeunesse a fantasy adventure, La Douane Volante about the initiation voyage of a young Breton orphan, Gwen-le-Tousseux, carried off by the wagon of Death. Two years later, François Place wrote a follow-up to the Atlas des géographes d’Orbae issuing in a boxed set two novels relating two crossed destinies, those of two characters from Orbae. His most recent novel, published in March of 2014, by Casterman, is again the recounting of a voyage, that of Angel, l’indien blanc, embarking in Buenos Aires on The Neptune and setting foot in Antarctica. Whether through his picture books or novels, the voyage is at...