“To be an Iconoclast today is to choose beauty, meaning, a certain quality of being, in the face of the chaos of the world”, said Sophie de Sivry to describe the publishing house she founded in 1997. And it is this passion for beauty, the total commitment to literature and the place of women, and the solidarity and solar intelligence of the heart that go away with the death so premature, 64 years old (she would have been 65 years old on June 16), from the editor.
Discoverer of Mathieu Palain, six times awarded, including the Interallié prize, the France culture Télérama prize; of Jean-Baptiste Andrea; Adeline Dieudonné (her first novel La Vraie Vie, Renaudot prize for high school students and bestseller); Maud Ventura My husband, another first novel with 100,000 copies; or even Pascale Robert-Diard, to name just a few of the talents she has published, Sophie de Sivry owes her “love at first sight” encounter with literature to a second-year literature teacher. “I had a passion for painting, I had imagined myself as a museum curator. But I missed the competition and I made a replacement at Flammarion, in fine books, and that triggered the rest, “she recently told Paris Match.
She would also know how to cultivate these two disciplines, by writing with her husband, Laurent Beccaria, himself the founder of the editions of the Arènes, L’Art et l’Ecriture and L’Art de l’Enfance, mixing her passions for the arts plastics and words. In the same vein, she would sign L’Art et la Folie and L’Art et le Sommeil”. Never very far from artists, she has also hosted the self-portrait of the restless Gérard Garouste with Judith Perrignon. Being an iconoclast also means trusting poets, which is how we find Christian Bobin and François Cheng in his catalog. And have the audacity to open his house to the rapper Akhenaton (from the group IAM), in the label “Iconopop”.
French women writers could not resist her call and this is how Marie Darrieussecq, Maylis de Kerangal, Gwenaëlle Aubry, Pauline Delabroy-Allard, Clémentine Beauvais, but also Nancy Huston wrote for Sophie de Sivry. “Mixture of aesthetics, of the human, of the desire to go towards the other – of femininity, they say” – summarized the editor who cultivated wisdom by surrounding himself with authors like Matthieu Ricard and especially the faithful Christophe André (and his bestseller Meditating day after day) His iconoclastic bibliography has a title to turn to today: Consolations. While waiting for the literary return of the house which will see again in bookstores Julia Kerninon and the new Jean-Baptiste Andréa with the title on which we close this tribute: Watch over her.
