Wajdi Mouawad

Born in Lebanon, Wajdi Mouawad fled the country for France from the age of 10 to 15 years old, before living in Quebec up to the 2000s. He adapts and stages contemporary plays, classics and his own texts published by Leméac/Actes-Sud. He also writes stories for children and the novels Visage retrouvé in 2002 and Anima, ten years later, awarded, amongst other prizes, by the Société des Gens de Lettres, the Phénix de la Littérature in Lebanon, the second novel prize in Laval and Lire en poche de la littérature française. Translated into twenty languages, his work is published or staged on the five continents. As well as awards for some of his plays and stagings, Wajdi Mouawad has been several times honored for his work as a whole, including Chevalier de l’Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2002, in Canada in 2009 and in Quebec the following year, the prix de la Francophonie of the SACD in 2004, a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines in Lyon and the Grand Prix du Théâtre de l’Académie Française in 2009. Wajdi Mouawad graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada in 1991, he co-created with Isabelle Leblanc his first company, Théâtre Ô Parleur, which he created Littoral [Tideline] with in 1997, and which he adapted for cinema in 2005. As an actor, he plays in his own plays but also under the direction of other artists such as Brigitte Haentjens, Dominic Champagne or Stanislas Nordey in France in 2010 in The Just Assassins by Camus or in Le Pays Rêvé by Jihane Chouaib and more recently in the first long film by Chloé Mazlo Sous le ciel d’Alice as well as Anatomie d’une chute by Justine Triet. As a stage director, he explores other writers such as Shakespeare, Euripides, Wedekind, Chekhov but also Naji Mouawad, Irvine Welsh, Edna Mazia, Louise Bombardier. While directing the Quat’Sous theatre in Montreal from 2000 to 2004, he created the play Incendies [Scorched], then adapted to cinema by Denis Villeneuve in 2010. Meanwhile, his work was staged for the first time in France at the Festival des francophonies de Limoges and at the Théâtre 71 in Malakoff, before going on tour in Europe, with shows such as Forêts [Forests] in 2006. Then director of the National Arts Center’s French Theatre in Ottawa, he was associated artist of the 2009 Avignon festival where he created the quartet Le Sang des promesses. Along with his theatre companies Abé Carré Cé Carré-Québec and Au Carré de l’Hypoténuse-France, he then became associated with the Nantes theatre Le Grand T, in 2011. While creating the play Temps at the Schaubühne, he embarked upon the journey of stage adaptations of Sophocles’ seven tragedies in thematic groups : Des Femmes, Des Héros, Des Mourants, which he then reunited in a complete production entitled Le Dernier Jour de sa vie, presented at Mons 2015, European capital of culture, as well as Avoir 20 ans 2015 [Being 20 in 2015] a project deployed over 5 years with 50 teenagers.