Maurice
G. Dantec

Maurice Georges Dantec was born in Grenoble, France on June 13th, 1959, within a communist family. His father was a scientific journalist and his mother a dressmaker, employees in the service of the City of Ivry-sur-Seine. He spent the majority of his childhood in the “red” suburbs. At the age of 5 years, a series of violent asthma attacks awakened his mind with the dreadful anxiety of imminent death, a memory that haunted him into adolescence. These health problems greatly affected him, along with the separation of his parents, and he lived with his mother and sister for more than 5 years in Alps, near Grenoble, his home town. in 1991, he decided to write seriously. On recommendation of Jean-Bernard Pouy, he submitted some of his writing in 1992 to Patrick Raynal, manager of the collection Thriller. It was a huge, unpublishable handwritten manuscript of five hundred pages. Instead of rejection, the editor saw in Maurice “the signs of a literary phenomenon” strongly encouraging him to create other works.