About the author: from writing music to writing a dystopia
Discover how the author made the transition from a career in science to a career as a writer, and how symphonic music became an integral part of the text.
Éric Monin was born in Grenoble in 1973 and now lives in Geneva. A passionate music fan from an early age, he studied piano. Despite an equally strong interest in literature, he decided to study science with a view to becoming a veterinary surgeon. When he entered the Toulouse Veterinary School, everything changed: music and literature became one…
In 1994, he read the biographies of Brahms, Beethoven and above all Mahler, which plunged him into a hitherto unknown musical universe. At the same time, he became interested in the sects that were sweeping France at the time. The real turning point came a few weeks later when he met Sophie, with whom he fell madly in love, and who quickly became the heroine of his first book.
For many years, he refined the text of his future novel, incorporating new ingredients, and the structure became more complex as the story unfolded. He then began writing a second volume, followed by a third.
In 2023, he had an encounter that gave birth to the definitive version of The Hymn of Truth.
From that moment on, he became aware of the richness of what he had already written, while at the same time structuring the work according to a very precise model: symphonic construction. Each word finds its meaning in a note, but each note can only survive in contact with the whole.
In January 2025, the first volume of The Hymn of Truth tetralogy will be published by La petite barque.
Éric Monin
Author of dystopian novels
Tetralogy The Hymn of Truth
The concept of the symphonic novel: the author structures his text like a symphony
The author built L’Hymne de Vérité on the language and structure of a symphony, with its different movements, dramatic inflections (sometimes major, sometimes minor) and harmonic inflections, while respecting the codes of dramaturgy. The novel thus enabled him to fuse his two passions – writing and music – into a coherent whole, a veritable initiatory quest for the hero, but also a personal quest and a wonderful experience: to bring to the public a scholarly work of art that brings together two forms of creation that, for him, are inseparable.