Pascal Bruckner

It’s a bitter moon that presides over our world of humanitarian disasters, bleak economic forecasts and growing racism and intolerance—the same Bitter Moon Pascal Bruckner explored thirty years ago in the novel Roman Polanski would later turn into a film. Now Bruckner is coming to the Onassis Stegi for a no-holds-barred conversation on love and infidelity, on marriage straight and gay, sex present and past, and taboos that contemporary society has grown out of and the new ones it has thrown up. Talking with the journalist and author, Yorgos Archimandritis, a regular collaborator with the quality French media, he will speak about religion and religious fanaticism, about ecology, in which he also discerns a measure of fundamentalism, about the Europe of today, which has rejected its old combative, creative self and limited itself to a sterile, guilt-ridden, defeatist handling of its past. Might this be the true root of our current crisis?

Pascal Bruckner regularly intervenes in the public sphere both as an award-winning novelist and essayist, and as a scholar and philosopher. Refusing to kowtow to the rules of political correctness, his books and articles often rock the boat, provoking and polarising readers with the views they express. One of the nouveaux philosophes from an early age, his path has sometimes coincided and sometimes diverged from theirs.

Succumbing only occasionally to the siren call of academia and posts offered in France and the US, Bruckner has pursued a fascinating authorial career in which he has never steered clear of clashes—even with his own ideas. A prolific writer, Pascal Bruckner has also penned children’s books and, through his association with Éditions Grasset, become a publishing insider. He is extremely popular in Greece, where sixteen of his books have been published in translation by Astartis and Patakis.