Hervé le Tellier: On the potential of constraint and of being a bitch to yourself In search of an Author

With more than a million copies sold and winning the 2020 Goncourt prize, french writer Hervé le Tellier experienced a late rise to fame in the literary world with his most recent novel, The Anomaly.

The book itself contains multiple books of different genres inside, and in some way already foresaw it’s own succes. We talk about his own relationship to fame, the potential danger of succes in light of the imposter syndrome and how he came up with the idea of L’Anomalie.

I love to write sentences I don’t like myself, says Hervé, before turning to what is important to him when writing a character, especially when based on himself.

Since 2019 Le Tellier has been the president of the influential literary group, Oulipo, which historic member counts George Perec, Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau amongst others. I ask how their way of using constraint is still relevant today, how they continue to work as a group, and what inspired him most throughout his career.