Joëlle Écormier

Joëlle Écormier (born March 31, 1967, in Le Tampon, Réunion), is a French writer.

Joëlle Écormier was born in 1967 in Le Tampon, a township located in the southern part of the island Réunion, a French overseas department in the southwestern Indian Ocean.

Since the time she was very young, she wrote texts for herself, which she did not publish.

She passed a literary baccalaureate (equivalent to a high school diploma) during the time of her schooling.

Dreaming of speaking English everyday, she entered college for the first year of a DEUG, (similar to an associate degree).

However, disappointed, she quickly abandoned her studies.

Nonetheless, she obtained an interpreter-guide certificate, allowing her to practice the language with English-speaking tourists.

Joëlle Écormier always writes in an open manner, and her path took her to live at Cherbourg, then at Toulouse.

Furthermore, she became the mother of two children whom she raised for ten years before rejoining the workforce as saleswoman in a large bookstore.

In their proposal, these authors had to develop their plot in the same way that it was begun by the author of The Savage Wedding, Goncourt Prize laureate in 1985.

But Queffélec, inspired by a recent event in the United States, imagined the story of Clara Turner, a young American who, condemned to death for having killed her viola professor, is granted by the State governor a 30-day sentence.

What she will do with these thirty days must be the subject of the novel, whose first chapter is published on the France Loisirs website.

In the text that she submitted for the second chapter, Joëlle Écormier gave life to the character of the lawyer, Clara, M. Hopeking.

Écormier conjured up the strategy that the young woman puts in place in order to escape her death, which is scheduled a month later.

Convinced, the jury adopted Écormier's text, which from then on became the official version from which the Internet users must create, proposing a third chapter.

After her, the jury holds onto the proposal from Marceline Breton, editor and free-lance designer working in Hanover, as well as those of Patrice Sickerson, technical head at French Télécom living in metropolitan Verrières-le-Buisson; Christophe Tissier, website creator living in Antony; Louis-Olivier Dupin, a local of Grenoble working as a supervisory staff agent in a transportation company; and finally, Christophe Sancy, publicist in Tervuren, Belgium.

After writing for herself during her childhood, she was a homemaker when she participated in a literary experiment launched by the book club France Loisirs in 1998: the collaborative writing of a novel whose first pages were endorsed by Yann Queffélec, and whose later pages were to be chosen from international submissions.

Back in Réunion and living from that point on in La Montagne, a neighborhood of the capital, Saint-Denis, she again became a homemaker when she participated in an original literary project launched by the book club France Loisirs in the course of 1998: the writing of a novel whose preliminary chapter was endorsed by the writer Yann Queffélac, while other authors were chosen from the messages sent from anonymous Internet users.

The selection of her submission for the second chapter of this collaborative work of fiction, which appeared in 1999 under the title 30 jours à tuer ("Thirty Days to Kill") led the young woman to launch herself into a career as a writer.

Trente jours à tuer, termed the "first novel created on the internet," appeared in 1999 after some changes were made to the different chapter for the purpose of increasing coherence between the written works of the seven authors.

The circulation is guaranteed, exclusively, by France Loisirs.

Encouraged by this experience, Joëlle Écormier started up in the career of author.

Écormier's first independent novel, Le Grand Tamarinier ("The Big Tamarind Tree"), was published by the Réunion publishing house Azalées Éditions in 2000.

Le Grand Tamarinier created a child and began a shift towards children's literature, which she pursued with her second work, a tale illustrated by her daughter's drawings.

After having been rejected by numerous publishers, who considered that the novel did not correspond to the format of their collections, the first novel written by Joëlle Écormier only appeared in 2000 in the Azalea Publishers, a Réunion publishing house.

Entitled "Le Grand Tamarinier" (The Grand Tamarind), it is about the history of a small boy called Louis who, beaten by his alcoholic father, finds the strength to rebel in order to embark upon a trip to the borders of the imaginary.

Lending to the story, and readable by all the public, the plot puts him in contact with a tree, a tamarind near which he is able to start afresh.

Guided by the counsel of this tree, the hero leaves in search of the secret that will allow him to finally find the peace of childhood.

In the meantime, he encounters numerous animals of Réunion bestiary: among others, a turtle, a chameleon, a papangue, a rat, a dolphin or a Phaethon that teaches him to fly.

According to Eva Baguey, author of the doctoral thesis on childhood literature and Réunion youth, this fact is relatively important because Békali allows the heroes, from a metamorphic point of view, to pass from the world of childhood to adulthood.

The work is illustrated with photos that stage the son of Joëlle Écormier as the hero.

They were taken by her husband Gilles.

The same year, still at the same editor, the author published a children's story, La Petite Fleur et le soleil.

This time, she illustrated with drawings by her ten-year-old daughter, Marie.

A question her daughter expressed when she was no more than four years of age is at the beginning of the work: "And if one day that sun didn't rise?"

Additionally, the story that takes place in Réunion, and told by an old sunflower, is about the adventures of a little, pure flower that is trying to find how to make the sun, who decided one morning to no longer get up, leave his bed.

In fact, after 2003 and the appearance of her second novel, Plus léger que l'air ("Lighter Than Air"), Joëlle Écormier, switching to Océan Éditions ("Ocean Editions"), dedicated herself to works for very small children.

She attempted to modernize children by avoiding motifs from Réunion cultural folklore.

Only in 2009 did she return to books without illustrations by publishing a collection of short stories for adolescents, Je t'écris du pont ("I write to you about the bridge"), and, above all, her third novel, Le Petit Désordre de la mer ("The Little Disorder of the Sea").

Le Petit Désordre de la mer won an award the same year at the Book and Comic Festival in Saint-Denis, Réunion.