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Florent Quarter

Florent Quartier

Born into a working-class family, Florent Quartier spent his early years in Roncq, a small town in northern France, in a neighborhood filled with retirees and red brick houses. A taste for reading didn't come to him right away. He didn't have the chance to see his siblings or parents flipping through pages of literary works on the family sofa during his childhood.

Available from May 15th

I started writing A Trip to Arcadia after three weeks in HMP Cardiff (Her Majesty's Prison). At that point, I hadn't yet gone to trial and I'd just met an inmate on walk time, who said to me, "Dude, I got nine months because I stole food from Tesco." It was at that precise moment that I realized I wasn't going to be released for a while. I asked the guards for some paper and a pen, and I got to work in my nine-square-meter cell...