Background
Dominique Rolin was born on May 22, 1913 in Brussels, Belgium; the daughter of Jean Rolin, a librarian, and Esther Rolin, an educator. She was a granddaughter of Léon Cladel.
The writer Dominique Rolin in France in March, 1995.
Dominique Rolin in Paris, France on March 24, 2000.
Author and winner of the Femina Prize for her book 'The Breath', Dominique Rolin, 24th November 1952.
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin
French writer Dominique Rolin on January 25, 1994 in Paris, France.
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin
Dominique Rolin was born on May 22, 1913 in Brussels, Belgium; the daughter of Jean Rolin, a librarian, and Esther Rolin, an educator. She was a granddaughter of Léon Cladel.
Dominique Rolin studied at Lycée Dachsbeck. In 1932, she entered École du service social and began to study as a librarian.
The literary career of Belgian novelist Dominique Rolin spanned for more than six decades. After a few minor works, she published her debut novel, Les Marais, in 1942. In addition to more than thirty novels, Rolin has also written short stories, children's literature, and drama. Over the course of her career, which many critics break up into at least three phases, Rolin received her share of critical praise and commercial success.
Rolin relocated to Paris, France, when she was thirty years old. Despite leaving her homeland, however, Rolin continued to use the land of her ancestors as the backdrop for many of her novels. One of the main reasons Rolin moved to Paris is that French reviewers were praising Les Marais, and she wanted to go where she was getting the recognition.
Soon after arriving in Paris in 1946, she published her third novel, Les deux soeurs. She wrote several more novels, including Le soufflé and Les quartre coins. The death of her husband was a turning point in both Rolin's life and work. Thereafter, her books became much more autobiographical and personal. She chronicled her husband's last days in the novel Le lit, which was written in the form of a journal. Also, she began developing a first-person, intimate narrative style, for which she became recognized by readers and literary critics in France.
One ability that Rolin has shown over the course of her career is to create stories out of the mundane experiences of everyday life. For example, her novel La rénovation revolves around the renovation of the old apartment building in which she lives in Paris. In the book, the building is given human-like qualities and is portrayed as a victim of the construction workers hired to alter its appearance. Like many of her other works, the book was praised by critics.
In 2000, at the age of 87, she published Journal amoureux. In the book the narrator (Rolin), mourning the death of her husband, meets a young man named Jim. This same character has made appearances in many of Rolin's novels, and there is speculation that he represents a real lover in the author's life.
Despite a large number of novels Rolin has published and the success she has earned, only a few of her novels have been translated into English.
In 1937, Dominique Rolin married Hubert Mottart and gave birth to a daughter Christine. In 1955 she married Bernard Milleret, a sculptor, who died in 1957. Rolin had a half-century secret relationship with an avant-garde writer and theorist Philippe Sollers, twenty-three years her junior.