Mickael Korvin

Mickael Korvin is a Franco-American author and translator. He is the creator of a French spelling reform called "nouvofrancet", an extremely simplified orthography for French. Fluent in the English and French languages, Korvin has alternated between writing novels in French and English, and translating foreign texts into French. His early work, Le boucher du Vaccarès (1990) and Je, Toro (1991) revisited the nouveau roman in an attempt to break what Korvin saw as the reigning nostalgia in contemporary French letters. Korvin's translations include Iggy Pop's I Need More and 19th-century American anarchist Lysander Spooner's Vices Are Not Crimes. Korvin formerly worked in advertising and journalism, but subsequently became a full-time writer and linguist. He is also a dealer in antique toys and art brut from his stall in the les Puces flea-market in Saint-Ouen, northern Paris. In early 2012, Korvin published a novel, Journal d'une cause perdue, which formed part of his campaign (which he called 'korvinism') to abolish accents, capital letters and all punctuation from written language, specifically the French language. His campaign gained notoriety in France as a result of a promotional video Korvin filmed with Franco-Algerian rapper Morsay, during which the rapper threatened to sexually violate grammarian and member of the Académie française Érik Orsenna. During the video, Korvin called Orsenna a "dictator of grammar" who is "killing the French language." The video was filmed in Les Puces, a flea-market in the Saint-Ouen area of Paris. An article on the website of French culture magazine L'Express called Korvin's intervention "fleas against the Académie française" (Les puces contre L'Académie française), while the same article compared Korvin's stance in Journal d'une cause perdue to Queneau, Apollinaire, Perec and Tristan Tzara. An article in le Nouvel Observateur compared Korvin's stance on punctuation with those of Georges Perec, Mathias Énard and Philippe Sollers.