Christelle Dabos

Christelle Dabos (born 1980) is a French author best known for ''The Mirror Visitor'' quartet, a fantasy series that has sold over a million copies at Gallimard Jeunesse and has been translated into twenty different languages. Dabos achieved success when her debut novel, ''A Winter's Promise'', was awarded first place at the 2013 Gallimard-RTL-Télérama First Novel competition.

Life and career

Christelle Dabos was born in 1980 in Cannes on the Côte d'Azur and grew up in a family of musicians. The author moved across the border to a village near La Louvière in Wallonia, Belgium, in 2005 and unsuccessfully sought work as a librarian.

Dabos began writing ''The Mirror Visitor'' quartet in 2007, but shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer in her jaw and had to undergo surgery and jaw reconstruction. In her convalescence, she turned to the website ''Plume d'argent'', a repository for fanfiction and original fiction where writers could exchange feedback. After becoming an administrator on the platform, Dabos was encouraged by her fellow writers to submit her first novel, the first volume of ''The Mirror Visitor'' quartet entitled ''A Winter's Promise'', to the Gallimard-RTL-Télérama First Novel competition, which she subsequently won in 2013. The novel was also named Best Book of the Year by critics and publications in the United States, including ''Entertainment Weekly'', ''Bustle'', ''Publishers Weekly'', and ''Chicago Review of Books''. ''The Mirror Visitor'' quartet narrates the adventures of Ophelia, a girl with the power to read the past of objects as well as the ability to pass through mirrors. The fantastical world in which the story is set includes 21 major arks, the remains of Earth after a cataclysmic event shattered it. Each ark is presided over by an ancestral family spirit and inhabited by people with unique abilities. The story begins when Ophelia is promised in marriage to Thorn, a taciturn man from a far-away ark called the Pole. The title of the series (''La Passe-miroir'' in French) is inspired by Le Passe-muraille, a literary work by the French writer Marcel Aymé.

In 2015, Dabos published at Gallimard Jeunesse the second novel in the series, ''The Missing of Clairdelune'', which along with ''A Winter's Promise'' was awarded the Grand prix de l'Imaginaire in the category Francophone Youth Novel in 2016. The third and fourth instalments of the series were released in 2017 and 2019, respectively. The series was compared by the national press to ''Harry Potter'' by J. K. Rowling and ''His Dark Materials'' by Philip Pullman. The novels were subsequently released in English translated by Hildegarde Serle at Europa Editions in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022. The series has sold over a million copies and has been translated in twenty languages. The book cover illustrations are by Laurent Gapaillard.

In 2022, Dabos published ''Et L'imagination prend feu'' as part of the ''Secrets d'écriture'' collection published by Le Robert. In 2023, Dabos published ''Here, and Only Here'' at Gallimard Jeunesse in French and at Europa Editions in English, translated by Hildegard Serle. Writing ''Here, and Only Here'', Dabos was "strongly influenced by magic realism", especially South American authors like Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende and José Donoso.

Publications

''The Mirror Visitor'' quartet

# ''A Winter's Promise'', translated by Hildegarde Serle, Europa Editions, 2018 ()
#* ''Les fiancés de l'hiver'', Gallimard Jeunesse, Collection Hors Série, 2013 ()
# ''The Missing of Clairdelune'', translated by Hildegarde Serle, Europa Editions, 2019 ()
#* ''Les disparus du Clairdelune'', Gallimard Jeunesse, Collection Romans Ado, 2015 ()
# ''The Memory of Babel'', translated by Hildegarde Serle, Europa Editions, 2020 ()
#*''La mémoire de Babel'', Gallimard Jeunesse, Collection Hors Série, 2017 ()
# ''The Storm of Echoes'', translated by Hildegarde Serle, Europa Editions, 2021
#*''La Tempête des échos'', Gallimard Jeunesse, Collection Romans Ado, 2019 ()

Standalone novels

* ''Et L'imagination prend feu'', Le Robert, 2022 ()
* ''Here, and Only Here'', translated by Hildegarde Serle, Europa Editions, 2023 ()
* ''Ici et seulement ici'', Gallimard Jeunesse, Collection Romans Ado, 2023 ()

References

External links

Official website of ''The Mirror Visitor'' quartet
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dabos, Christelle
1980 births
Living people
21st-century French novelists
French fantasy writers
French women novelists