Noëlle Revaz

Noëlle Revaz (born 1968) is a Swiss author, who writes in French. She is best known for her first novel, Rapport aux bêtes (tr: With the Animals), which won several literary awards, including the Schiller Prize, the Prix Marguerite Audoux, the Prix Lettres Frontière, and the Henri Gaspoz Prize, and has been adapted for stage and film.

Life
Noëlle Revaz was born in Vernayaz, Valais, in Switzerland, in 1968, and was one of nine siblings. She studied at the Collège de l'Abbaye de Saint-Maurice, and later at the University of Lausanne, where she graduated in 1995 with a degree in Latin, French, and medieval French. She then worked as an educator for several years thereafter, teaching Latin. She currently teaches at the Institut littéraire suisse, in Biel. Revaz is married to Swiss author Michael Stauffer.

Career
From 1995 to 1996, Revaz wrote for radio under the pseudonym, Maurice Salanfe.

Revaz published her first book, Rapport aux bêtes (tr: With the Animals), in 2001, with Gallimard. It won multiple literary awards, including the Schiller Prize, the Marguerite Audoux Prize, the Prix Lettres Frontière, and the Henri Gaspoz Prize. It was translated widely, including into German, as on wegen den Tieren by Andreas Münzner, into Italian as Cuore di bestia by Maurizia Balmelli, and into English, as With the Animals, by William Donald Wilson for Dalkey Archive Press. Rapport aux bêtes was adapted for the stage in Switzerland in 2004, at the Le Poche Geneve, and in Germany as well. It was also adapted for film in France in 2009, as Coeur animal (tr: Animal Heart). The book is narrated by the protagonist, Paul, a man who controls his family, consisting of his wife and children, through violence and abuse, but finds his authority challenged when a new farmhand, Jorge, pushes back against his control.

Revaz's second book, Efina, won the Dentan Prize in 2010. In 2014, she published L’Infini Livre, which won the Swiss Literature Award in the following year. She has also published a collection of short stories, titled Hermine Blanche (Gallimard).

Revaz also writes for theatre and radio, and has written a radio play commissioned by France Culture, titled Sur les berges, as well as the scripts for the stage adaptations of her own book, Rapport aux bêtes.