This week, we’re excited to feature Jean Charbonneau, an alumnus of our program from 1998! Jean was born in Montreal, and studied creative writing at Harvard Extension School and the University of Southern Mississippi before getting his MA in creative writing from BU. He freelanced as a book critic for a few years, and wrote for AGNI, the Boston Book Review (now defunct), the Detroit Free Press, the Denver Post, and other newspapers.
Jean is currently working on a novel set in Baltimore, where he worked as a librarian in hospitals and in the Maryland state prison system. He lived in the US (Boston, Hattiesburg, Detroit, and Baltimore) for nearly twenty years before returning to Montréal in 2011.
While Jean has published stories in both French and English, all of his novels were written in his native language, French. Québec Amérique, a Canadian publishing house, published all three of them. Jean says that his first book, a literary novel called Comme un intrus, began as a story that he wrote while here at BU. Jean’s second novel, Tout homme rêve d’être un gangster, is noir, and his third novel, Camus doit mourir, is an imaginative tale set in the last days of the Nazi occupation of Paris, about an assassination attempt on Albert Camus by a right-wing extremist who is obsessed with Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
Congrats to you, Jean! We’re so happy the program was helpful to you, and we look forward to reading your next novel.
