User:Liitle Alice/Rikki ducornet

Rikki Ducornet spent her childhood on the Bard College campus in upstate New York, where her father, Gerard DeGre taught social philosophy.When her father received a Fulbright to teach at the American University of Cairo,the family moved to Egypt for a year, an experience that informed Ducornet's seventh novel Gazelle, published by Knopf in 2003.A major in painting and print making, she received her B.A. From Bard in 1964.Bard provided a profound experience in creative living and what she calls a certain kind of intellectual fearlessness. Ducornet met both Robert Coover and Robert Kelly at Bard whose interest in metamorphoses informed her own.She has illustrated Coover, most notably Spanking The Maid, published by Bruccoli Ckark in 1981. In 1964 she married the French surrealist Guy Ducornet, and in 1966 travelled with him to Algeria where they lived for two years.They lived together for many years in the Loire Valley where they raised a son, Jean-Yvies, a composer and music producer in LA.The couple divorced in 1993. Rikki Ducornet is the author eight novels, including The Jade Cabinet, a finalist for The National Book Critics' Circle Award, The Fan Maker's Inquisition, an L.A. Times Best Book of the Year, and Gazelle, winner of Le Prix Guerlain in Guy Ducornet's translation.. Her novels are published widely abroad ,notably Gallimard in France, and Sphinx Bokforlag in Sweden.She is also the author of a book of essays, The Monstrous and The Marvelous, three collections of short stories and, at the beginning of her career, five collections of poetry. Rikki Ducornet has received numerous awards among them both a Lannan Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award in Fiction, the Charles Flint Kellog Award in Arts And Letters from Bard College, and in 2008 an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been widely reviewed, notably Jonathan Coe's review of The Fountains of Neptune in the London Review of Books, 1992 in which Coe writes: ' The Fountains of Neptune is never less than fascinating. It should be hunted down Hungrily."Writing of her fiction in The Nation, critic Charlotte Innes writes: We are living in an age of intellectual and emotional starvation that is largely without spirituality, cynical about social change and disconnected from the natural world. We need writers to look at these difficult issues in a sophisticated manner. Ducornet has done this." Of Netsuke, her most recent novel, William Gass writes:"Netsuke comes at the summit of Rikki Ducornet's passionate, caring and accomplished career." Rikki Ducornet exhibits her paintings internationally, and has work is part of the permanent collection of the Salvador Allende Museum of Solidarity in Santiago, Chile. Her collected papers are housed in the  Ohio State University Library.