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Mark Hutchinson

Mark Hutchinson is a literary translator who renders French-language fiction and poetry into English. His translations of Anne Serre's novels and René Char's verse are published by New Directions.

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About Mark Hutchinson

Mark Hutchinson is a literary translator whose work brings French-language writing into English. At New Directions, he has rendered several books by the French novelist Anne Serre, as well as poetry and prose by René Char.

His Anne Serre translations span a range of forms: the novella collection The Fool and Other Moral Tales, the novel The Beginners, the erotic fairy-tale Governesses, and the friendship narrative A Leopard-Skin Hat. Each of these carries Serre's signature blend of surrealism, moral questioning, and lyrical precision, and Hutchinson's task is to preserve that voice without flattening its strangeness.

A Leopard-Skin Hat, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025, follows a narrator's intense attachment to his childhood friend Fanny, a woman battling severe psychological disorders. Serre wrote the book after the death of her little sister. Hutchinson also translated Char's Hypnos: Notes from the French Resistance and The Inventors and Other Poems, extending his work beyond fiction into wartime prose and verse.

For a first encounter, A Leopard-Skin Hat is the most direct and emotionally grounded of his Serre translations. Its short scenes move steadily between hope and despair, and the narrative's intimate scale makes it easier to enter than the more kaleidoscopic novellas gathered in The Fool.

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A Leopard-Skin Hat

A Leopard-Skin Hat is a slim, deeply felt novel by French writer Anne Serre, translated from the 2008 original by Mark Hutchinson. It traces the lifelong friendship between an unnamed Narrator and his childhood friend Fanny, a woman whose profound psychological struggles make her at once the most vivid and most elusive person in his life. Structured as a series of fragmentary scenes spanning decades, the book is as much about the impossibility of fully knowing another person as it is about that person. Written in the aftermath of Serre's own sister's death, the novel becomes a meditation on grief, memory, and the stories we construct to hold the people we lose. Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, it stands as a distinctive piece of literary fiction that questions the very conventions of the novel while remaining genuinely moving.

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