Jean-Luc Coatalem


Jean-Luc Coatalem is a French journalist and writer.

Biography

In the wake of a family of officers, Jean-Luc Coatalem spent his childhood in Polynesia and his adolescence in Madagascar. The incessant removals gave him the taste of elsewhere and would make him bulimic of travels and reports.
Returning to Paris, he worked in publishing and then was reporter in the footsteps of Francisco Coloane, Nicolas Bouvier or Ella Maillart for , le Figaro Magazine and Géo, which opened him a position of deputy editor-in-chief. He explored nearly eighty countries, "on foot, on horseback, in ultralight and on ice-breakers". In particular, he produced two accounts on Chiloé Island in Chile and Labrador which drew attention on him.
Coming to his thirties, this traveler, novelist, writer and essayist writer for whom "all travel ends in books and everything starts from a reading", published wandering narratives and humorous novels.
In 1992, he was with Nicolas Bouvier and Gilles Lapouge one of the nine signatories of the "Manifesto for a traveling literature" published under the aegis of.
In 2001, Je suis dans les mers du Sud, a very personal essay that he drew from an investigation on Paul Gauguin, was distinguished by numerous awards, including the Prix Breizh 2002 and was translated into English and Chinese. He confirmed his notoriety two years later by an ode to geography and wandering, La consolation des voyages.
Jean-Luc Coatalem no longer hesitates to approach intimist writing. Il faut se quitter déjà published in 2008, is a melancholic account of a non passionate love wandering between Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Le Dernier roi d'Angkor, inspired by the difficult adoption of a Cambodian orphan, evokes the indescribable tear of a past abolished.
After Le Gouverneur d’Antipodia published at in 2012 was awarded the Prix Roger Nimier, he published Nouilles froides à Pyongyang, an unusual narrative under the dictatorship of Kim Jong-Il. His last work, Fortune de mer was published by Stock editor in 2015.
Passionate about art and graphic design, he participated in parallel to works or catalogs around the sculptor Denis Monfleur at editions la Table ronde, the painter at editions La Navire, but also developed a fruitful collaboration with his accomplice and friend Jacques de Loustal. They jointly signed three albums with Casterman.

Works