English bio
Geneviève Genicot is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, editor and writing workshop facilitator. She has been writing fiction and poetry since childhood. After living in Grenoble for about 10 years and traveling a lot in Europe, especially in Italy and Portugal, she came back to Brussels where she grew up for another 10 – and is now found more and more often in Madrid.
She is the author of the novella Canicule (Maelström), a tribute to Brussels through the story of a train attendant, and a series of about 10 short stories published in magazines, such as Les mains d'Enzo, illustrating the end of the French public postal service through the story of a young postman, and Histoire d’amour, the meeting of a grieving painter with football enthusiasts (Marginales magazine). Her text Sushi bar, a poetic narrative, was published by F de Phosphène with photographs by Sophie Le Béon and is in the process of being translated into English; it recounts a night-time encounter between a powerful man, Mister Boss, and L'Homme, who has extricated himself from the violence of capitalist forces (finalist for the Bernard Vargaftig prize).
Geneviève also questions urban logic through short stories that sometimes veer towards poetry. She describes the city of Madrid in a series of texts published in English in the anthology La Realidad (Café Literario Editores) and in The Madrid Review (Ybernia).
Her poetry on cities and modern life questions technology, urbanity, economic logic, and the place of art and humanity. It can be found in several anthologies (Bacchanales) compiled by the Maison de la Poésie Rhône-Alpes and devoted to the themes of 'poetry and' - science, nature, cinema, women. Other publications also feature her work: Voix d'encre (Montélimar), la Revue des Archers (Marseille), Ressacs (Lille), Nouvelles d'Harfang (Nantes), Papier Machine (Bruxelles) and she has collaborated in making artist's books with painter Chantal Legendre or photographer Géraldine Dubois.
Video poems available on YouTube give the writing an audiovisual form. Among them is lin[s]eul, a poem about social ties written during lockdown and performed remotely by a choir of 15 artists. Geneviève has participated in the last three editions of ‘POETRY EXPO’, an initiative of the European network Versopolis, with, for example, Le symposium et le vautour on the theme of the climate emergency, and Les bêtes d'ébène on anxiety disorders - each participation giving rise to translations of the texts into English.
She is particularly interested in the question of humanity's relationship with technology. She explores the emotions that bind us to machines in sound pieces created during a residency with the poets' collective Ecrits/Studio and collected under the title Me and My Machine (available to listen to on Soundcloud); other pieces are currently in progress. With Miguel Pascual, she wrote the dystopian video poem La mue radieuse/A radiant shedding. They work at the intersection of poetry and design fiction, a technique for questioning desirable futures through the creation of fictions, scenarios and concrete objects. In 2025, they have received an EU grant to pursue this research in Tallinn University, Estonia, and have given workshops around it in Madrid and Brussels.
Geneviève reads and performs her texts in public. Since 2022, she has been offering, with Samantha Barendson, Fany Buy and Pauline Picot (+ guests), the literary performance On se revoit très vite (See you again very soon). She has participated in festivals such as Textes en l'air (Saint-Antoine-l'Abbaye), Gratte-monde (Grenoble), the Marathon des autrices (Brussels), L'origine des mondes (Maison folie, Lille), and Les Mardis de la poésie (Maison de la Poésie Rhône-Alpes), Poetik Bazar (Bruxelles). She has read her texts in Spanish and English on open stages abroad.
She has studied painting and illustration for 7 years in Académie Constantin Meunier in Brussels and, as a lover of both the meaning and form of words, she sometimes stages them in calligraphic paintings. She has also organised an exhibition of Korean calligraphy and poetry in Brussels. Occasionally, she collaborates on drawings or illustrations, as she did for Cathy Ko's two books, Maîtresse Poet Poet (Joël Sadeler Prize for Youth Poetry) and Je ne t'écrirai plus mais je t'aimerai toujours, both published by Gros Textes.
She is also a professional editor at Edern Editions (fiction) and Editions de l'Université libre de Bruxelles (academic texts) and has accompanied individual projects as a freelancer.
She holds 2 master's degrees, in Romance Languages and Literature (French/Italian), and in International Relations, as well as a PhD from Sciences Po Grenoble. She teached french, literature, academic writing, research methods, and sociology, in Grenoble and Krakow universities, and published several articles and book chapters about collective action and political cultures, but also about teaching languages with theater. In 2024, she published Dictionnaire amoureux et néanmoins critique de l'Université (A Loving Yet Critical Dictionary of the University), which she edited; a collection of love letters from French researchers and teachers to their university and their profession, born out of activist workshops that she led on the adaptation of research language to business language in the academic world. She is both happy and sad that the book has been published, fifteen years after she defended her thesis on student unions' opposition to the commodification of higher education in Europe - now a reality.