© Monique Thomassettie
M.E.O. éditions
Foreign rights
Founded in Brussels in 2007 in order to publish translations of authors from the former Yugoslavia into French, M.E.O. publishing house expanded immediately its activities by publishing original works by French-speaking authors.
M.E.O. is dedicated to general literature. After 20 years of existence, it is today one of the main Belgian literary publishers. Its catalog includes more than 200 titles. It won 16 literary prizes, including the Prize of Parliament, the La Renaissance française Award, The Marguerite de Navarre Prize or the best short novel. In addition, the translated authors obtained many prizes in their own language or in other translations.
All works are published simultaneously in printed books and homothetic digital books (PDF and EPUB). Its catalog is divided into 4 collections.
– Translation of Balkan authors, now extended to other linguistic fields, including Chinese.
– Novels, short stoies, life stories and a few unclassifiable literary essays by French-speaking authors from Belgium, France and Africa.
– A collection in partnership with the Museum of Medicine of the University of Brussels publishing illus- trated books related to the History of Medicine and the exhibitions organized by the museum.
– A collection in concert with the Museum of Literature, which publishes heritage writers from Central Afri- ca (Congo, Rwanda and Burundi).
A poetry collection (written in French or translated) stopped in 2017, but the books remain available
The editorial line combines the interest of the story, a vision of the world, a humanist sensitivity and a work on writing, in particular on the pruning of texts and on the use of ellipses. We seek to avoid the “navel-ga- zing”; we try to discover new talents, but we also want to retain our authors.
M.E.O. is approved by the Ministry of Culture. It is a member of the Association of Belgian Publishers and of the professional association “Les Éditeurs singuliers”.
ALREADY TRANSLATED AND PUBLISHED
Zam - A life story by Zam "Martino" Ebale
Italian
Being translated in English (UK + USA)
Le jugement des glaces - Jean Jauniaux
Albanian
Being translated in Turkish and Bengali
Pas faite pour - Véronique Adam
Bulgarian
Grandson of a leper, born of a line of traditional women dancers, internationally awarded dancer-choreographer-singer, educator engaged in social integration through the art of disadvantaged young people, Zam Ebale, before choosing exile to escape the homophobic law in Cameroon, his native country, found in Buddhism, which preaches the respect and dignity of every human life, the means to transcend suffering, to «turn the poison into an elixir», tears into joy, karma on missions ». After having spent seven years illegally (holder of an order to leave the territory unenforceable, nevertheless recognized and subsidized by the Ministry of Culture and representing Belgium at dance festivals abroad), he became Belgian and envolved by his host country in international projects of artistic collaboration, while continuing to produce choreographies, dance and sing.
A teacher harassed by his pupils, Barthélémy sinks into an insomniac depression inspiring him to write a book about his nocturnal wanderings through a marginal Brussels. The dazzling success of the book and its adaptation as a reality TV show enable Barthélémy to retire and take refuge in Saint-Idesbald, on the Belgian coast, near the French border. While walking, he comes across a group of refugees fleeing the Calais Jungle. Led by Aslan who was a teacher in his destroyed village, the group was hoping, like so many others, to cross the Channel. For Barthélémy, this meeting is a redemption. He wants to help them and rediscover his vocation as a teacher. With his friends, an uncompromising town-planning official, an ex-fisherman and customs officer, and a former sailor who is restoring an old boat, he will organize the crossing of the group to Scotland.
A novel of redemption and adventure.
Cécile, an obscure violin teacher, tackled by a companion who is more successful than her in music, is a frustrated, bitter young woman lacking in self-confidence. Her friends offer her a subscription to a fitness club for her thirty-fifth birthday, which would give her life an unexpected turn. The friendship of an instructor will lead her to put her prejudices aside and introduce her to a universe she never imagined she was made for. Meeting a regular of the fitness room will shake up her self-image and drop her – perhaps – at the dawn of another existence. This first novel, although pure fiction, explores the two familiar worlds of his author (a violonist and former Belgian fitness champion, while bearing witness, not without humor and self-mockery, to the contradictions of a contemporary young woman.
Au revoir Lisa - Françoise Houdart
Bulgarian
De l'existence de Dieu dans le tram 56 - Gérard Adam
Croatian
Marco et Ngalula - Gérard Adam
Croatian
Lightning strikes the centuries-old lime tree in front of Eugenie’s house, knocking the old lady to her kitchen floor. Her daughter Lisa goes to see her at the hospital. This is the beginning for Lisa of an awareness of all the mysteries that have marked her life, from the Mona Lisa pension, near Santa Maria Novella station, at Firenze, where her parents spent their honeymoon and where she was – perhaps – conceived, until the escape of her father Auguste, unable to assume a serious accusation, and of whom she no longer knew anything but postcards sent from the four corners of France and Italy. From unsaid to unsaid, a wall has been erected, which she must now deconstruct stone by stone.
Gérard Adam (winne or shortlisted of several literary prizes) has chosen from his short stories published in magazines or collective works those that seemed to him to offer a coherence of inspiration and writing, a faithful reflection of his thoughts and sufficient diversity to constitute a collection that combines true fictions, autofictions and transposed autobiographical stories, while also providing a testimony about the society in which we are immersed.
The book won the Emma Martin Prize of the Belgian Writers Association.
Published in 1996, reissue in a Belgian paperback collection in 1999 then 2001 (best-seller of the collection). Two children, aged ten and twelve. Marco, hates football. And because of his flute lessons, he is not allowed to watch “mind-numbing” series or “get epilepsy with a game console”. While his parents are travelling, he is going to spend vacation in the countryside with his grandparents. There are no friends there and their old dog is just dead. Marco feels very alone. During a walk, he meets Ngalula, a little black Cinderella, a «fairy surrounded by a flight of butterflies», those little bits of yellow ribbon that shine in her eternal pigtails. Ngalula-the orphan, parked with her adoptive family in the «Castle», a center for asylum seekers that divides the inhabitants of the village. Between them, the difference will nourish the friendship, as brief as it is intense, absolute as love.
Adgez, dernière page - Daniel Soil
Arabic (Marocco)
L'Avenue, La Kasbah - Daniel Soil
Bengali
La chambre du premier - Monique Bernier
Bulgarian
Why such a cruel crime, committed in the manner of slow torture? Johannes V., United Nations expert in Morocco, was slashed with a knife in his villa of Rabat. Some people have asked themselves: was this crime not a sign, among others, of a spirit of the times, marked by an inevitable clash of civilizations? And others, in the diplomat’s entourage, evoke the gulf existing, on a global level, between the thinness of some and the fatness of others. In order to investigate informally, the United Nations appointed a Belgian “cultural attaché” on site. A strange journey will follow, from Casablanca to Tangier, from Al Hoceima to Ouarzazate, and a parade of unsavory characters, but also of active, generous activists who do not give up. Will the matter be clarified in the sands of Agdez where a former penitentiary stands?
Daniel Soil was a Belgian diplomat in Morocco from 2004 to 2008 and in Tunisia from 2008 to 2015.
Elie, a young Belgian filmmaker who came to Tuni-
sia, meets Alyssa, a teacher. The cultural barriers that
constrain their nascent love – which began and grew
on Facebook – are shattered by the 2011 Revolution,
in which they both engage. Accompanied by the back-
ground of the opera “Dido and Aeneas”, we follow in
parallel the evolution of their love and that of the poli-
tical situation: demonstrations, mobilization of young
and old, free speech, until the fall of the dictator and the advent of a hope for democracy that sign the end of the one and the other.
First novel about the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, starting point of the “Arab Spring”, written by a foreigner who was the privileged witness of it.
After her father’s death, Sylvie was raised by her paternal grandmother, who separated her from her mother and older brother. She married very young on a whim and emigrated to Australia. An unhappy union, almost a sequestration. Now that her two children are adults, she finds the courage to flee in order to take refuge with her grandma. Unfortunately, the old lady has just died. While exploring the house and particularly the first floor bedroom where her grandmother lived, she becomes aware of another reality concerning her childhood and discovers carefully buried family secrets.
Hugo - Monique Bernier
Bulgarian
Les dessins du Diable - José-Alain Fralon
German
Les petits lutteurs - Jean-François Füeg
Bulgarian
Hugo was five years old when his mother disappeared. She left without leaving a forwarding address, his father told him. “She wanted to become an actress, she met a filmmaker…” What can a little boy abandoned by his mother do? He cries, he waits for her, he looks for her, certain she’ll come back. His father is also sad, depressed. He starts drinking and becomes mean to Hugo, all the while trying to keep up appearances for the benefit of the neighborhood. Fortunately, there’s school, his friend Martin, another friend he completely invented, who consoles and advises him, kind people in the neighborhood. And above all, his mother’s mother, Mamylouise…
Now that he’s nine, Hugo tells his story. From his mother’s departure until the day when…
Born in 1942 in Antwerp, Arthur Langerman miraculously escaped the Shoah which decimated all his family except for his mother. He is very poor and shas to leave school to work for a diamond merchant. The latter exploits him until Arthur understands that colored diamonds, then despised, will increase in value. Nicknamed “the king of colored diamonds”, he will sell his precious stones all over the world, not without incredible adventures. But he will never forget the murder of his family by the Nazis. Whan he discovers a horrible postcard showing a caricatured “disgusting old ‘Jew’” sodomizing a little girl, he understands that this trivialization of contempt and hatred of the Jews conditioned minds and opened the way to Hitler. From then on, he begins to collect anti-Semitic posters, drawings, and paintings. Caricatures? No, the degradation of millions of human beings into vermin! His collection has been exhibited in numerous museums in Belgium abd abroad. Its ten thousand pieces are today brought together in a foundation in Berlin, under the aegis of the university and the city. Several publications, as well as television reports and numerous press articles, have been devoted to the collection and to Arthur Langerman himself.
Diane von Fürstenberg, whose mother and that of Arthur Langerman knew each other in the death camps, wrote a foreword.
There are friendships that never end, especially if they were forged at university, in a generous activism that bordered on folklore. And even if thirty years have passed, tossing the friends into very different lives, whatever the mess their old friend Eddy has gotten himself into, Nicolas, Louis, David, Étienne, and Ivo don’t hesitate to hit the road to the Balkans to save his ass. Even if it means confronting a bloodthirsty mafia.
But this journey may also have other, more or less conscious,motivations. Having reached the age where the five fifty-somethings feel they no longer understand a world in frenetic transformation, they are forced to make a painful reckoning.
A cruel portrait of men born in the sixties, confronted with the disintegration of the ideals they fought for, the emergence of ready-made ideas they reject, and above all, their own weaknesses.
Les tourments d'un roi - Anselme Nindorera
German
Stella Maris - Michel Joiret
Bulgarian
Sous le rideau, la petite valise brune - Françoise Thiry
Bengali
Self-published in Bujumbura in 1993 shortly before the writer’s death, the historical novel Les Tourments d’un roi focuses on the figure of the last Mwami of Burundi who reigned before German colonization. The sovereign, who had successfully repelled the Arab attempts at conquest, had to yield to the powerful armament of the Second Reich. In addition, he was trapped by the betrayal of two felon princes. Despite the destabilization of national unity and the disproportion of forces, Mwezi Gisabo opposed to the future colonizer such resistance that it aroused the respect of the invader. The Germans left the defeated monarch a few margins, including the choice, via the White Fathers of Africa, of French as the language of instruction in the new culture. Precise, rhythmic, often colorful, the story of Nindorera exposes the many difficulties of the reign of this valiant one-eyed king who could not find, in the major ingredients of his culture, the means to oppose the triumph of technique.
Adèle dies during the pandemic and Damien, her husband, is devastated. He decides to take the train to Ostend, where he rents Stella Maris, an old house where he went on vacation after his mother left. He reconnects with Brother Marc, his former teacher and benevolent confessor; he tries to discover if his father, who disappeared after being accused of having killed his mistress, is still on the run or is dead. But the mystery remains opaque and Damien, in Ostend ravaged by the virus, seeks to discover a new life, entangled in an obscure affair of a secular curse, mocked by a procession of carnival masks, jostled by the puffiness of James Ensor and the marine rigors. Between rain and wind, unreadable sand writing on the windows and history of the town, Damien discovers a mythical Flanders where present and past, real and imaginary merge.
In 1966, a Boeing arriving from Bujumbura landed on Belgian soil. A half-asleep girl, holding a small brown suitcase in her hand, trotted behind a flight attendant, who handed her over to a man wearing a white shirt with a funny white collar, a black suit, and a small golden cross. The hostess greeted “Monseigneur” before disappearing. This little girl, a Metis child of a Burundian mother and an unknown Belgian father, has been taken away from her maternal family to be, like many others, given in adoption to a “good Catholic family”. Throughout the narration, the hidden part of the narrator questions her “licit” part in the hope that one day both will join. The reader follows the slow metamorphosis of the child and the deliberate amputation of her memory until her fierce struggle against oblivion. Her efforts to “reattach” her broken halves lead to the discovery of her astonishing identity.
This book is a singular journey imbricated in a collective history that has long been hidden and is now recognized as a secret of Church: the forced abduction of the half-breeds, “the children of shame” born under colonization before the Independences.
Dans les yeux de l'Afrique - Leïla Zerhouni
Bengali
De Blancs Oiseaux boivent la Lumière
Monique Thomassetie
Croatian
Lumière nomade - Philippe Leuckx
Croatian
Hired to translate instruction manuals for washing machines while she dreams of being a translator of beautiful texts, Luce befriends Qina, a Zimbabwean migrant. A talented sculptor, he makes her a mysterious statuette before disappearing. Distraught, Luce, sets out as a volunteer to follow in her friend’s footsteps. Why does his mother react so violently when she sees the statuette? Why does she refuse to hear about her son? By discovering the sometimes dark meanders of the human soul, Luce falls in love with a continent with a thousand and one facets, a thousand and one sorrows, a thousand and one riches, and a thousand and one hopes.
Quand vous serez - Daniel Simon
Croatian
Poetry
Poetry
Tango du Nord - Luc Baba
Croatian
Poetry
Poetry
CURRENTLY BEING TRANSLATED
L'Arbre blanc dans la forêt noire
Gérard Adam
Being translated in Chinese
A young Belgian doctor arrives in Vonzo, a small town in Kalibia (Central Africa), to become director of a hospital as part of the Belgian-Kalibian cooperation. He will discover Africa and its spells through fascinating characters, Dyana, the young black nun, Malu he will make his companion, Gakuba, the politician in disgrace, Binda Pasi, the sculptor, Lemmie and Sebas, the wandering musicians… Novel of awareness and discovery of the other. Adventure novel too, with the revolt of the Lower River against a dictatorial power based on institutional corruption and the plunder of national wealth. A revolt that ends an intervention by French and Belgian paratroopers under humanitarian pretexts, in fact to keep the regime in place. Vast fresco with multiple resonances, this novel of almost 500 pages is a meditation on a continent overwhelmed by all the evils but immensely rich in future, at the same time as a plea for the enrichment by the discovery and the acceptance of the other. Third edition – NCR (AT&T) Award
Niznayou - Françoise Pirart
Turkish
A provincial town in the Ardennes. In the refugee center where she works as social assistent, Lena meets a boy, a little wild, who claims to be called “Niznayou”. Intrigued by his mysterious attitude, the young woman gradually discovers his past when he still lived with his mother in Grozny, under the Russian bombs. A feeling of empathy and tenderness develops between Lena and her protégé. Confronted with violence – she in her couple, he in the war – both feel a powerful need to be loved. Around this encounter are a few thrill-seeking hunters (among whom is Lena’s husband) who think they’re vigilantes, a kind-hearted adventurer strange enough to start a rumor, two solitary old men, a forest where one can get lost...
All ordinary people, but some of them will breathe new life into Niznayou, while others will get carried away by their own little delusions. And at the center of it all, the child. But what do they really know about him?
Stille Nacht - Gérard Adam
Croatian
At the dawn of his seventh decade, while preparing for a white Christmas so rare in Belgum, Yvan Jankovic, son of stateless people naturalized after the Marcinelle disaster, reflects on Life with a capital L and ruminates on the minor adventures of his own existence, mediocre because “people like us,” as his father used to say, whatever their abilities, cannot hope for better. In the retirement home that replaced the sanatorium where his father died of silicosis, he drives his mother to mass and meditates on the aftereffects of a Catholicism that he rejected but whose moral concepts have handicapped his emotions. His car skids in the blizzard, he wanders through a hypermarket. In the solitude of his house, he remembers with emotion his beloved wife, who died of cancer. And on a whim he undertakes the first real escape of his life, ending up spending Christmas with unlikely companions not far from Ypres, where European armies massacred each other with the help of toxic gas. With the ever-present layers of immigration that mixed together to create Belgium.
Ressac - Claude Donnay
Croatian
Poetry
CONTRACT SIGNED OR NEGOTIATION FINALIZED BUT AWAITING NEW SUBSIDY PROCEDURES TO BE IMPLEMENTED
Eden Beach 1970 - Anne Duvivier
Bengali
Charlotte, a young Belgian woman «from a good family», has gone to live in Chicago, where her husband, promised a bright future, has obtained a job in finance. When she learns that he is cheating on her, her world collapses. She runs away with the hope of making him realize that she is her only love, and ends up in Eden Beach, a seaside resort on the East Coast, where she has never been.
The shock is terrible. We are in the States, and in 1970! The war in Vietnam is raging, young people free themselves from the shackles and advocate free love, girls take the pill... She who never worked or even imagined having to becomes a waitress in a fringe restaurant, in contact with a new friend she discovers young people refractory to war, a black cook on the run, a sect with mystical pretensions, a universe a hundred thousand miles from what she knew in Brussels in her right-thinking milieu. An unexpected event will launch her into a new life.
Chadi est perdu - Naji habra
Arabic (Egypt)
Seven scouts who left their native Damascus for different countries (Belgian, France, Germany, Italy, United States and Emirates) meet again forty years later for a few days of sightseeing in the Bay of Naples. There, they reminisce about shared memories of a country that no longer exists. Gradually, the schoolboy moments allow more intimate questions to emerge: the meaning of success, the price of integration, identity, commitment, cowardice, transmission... Its title refers both to a famous song by Feyrouz and to an eighth scout who refused to compromise with the Assad regime and whose whereabouts have been lost in the group. Oscillating between lightness and gravity, Chadi is Lost approaches exile from the unusual angle of integration at different stages of life. But perhaps the seven intertwined narratives are merely variations of a single story: the impossible quest for lost innocence?
Quelque chose à te dire - Annie Préaux
Bulgarian
Agathe Verneuil, born in the Borinage (a mining region of Belgium), never knew her father, who was killed by a gunshot in 1944, a few months before her birth. Her mother then entrusted her to her sister, who raised her in Mons, the regional capital. After a great heartbreak, Agathe married a farmer, the brother of her best friend, and became a farmer herself, giving up teaching French. In 2022, having left her husband several years earlier to live with a new partner in another part of Belgium and resume her teaching career, the woman she was never able to call “Mom” died at almost 100 years old. She felt no grief. At the funeral, a distant cousin on her father’s side appeared. Will Agathe finally learn the truth about the death of her father, Armand Verneuil, whom some say was executed by the Nazis, others killed by the Resistance for collaboration? Will she be able to reconcile with her own daughter, Julie, who took over her father’s farm after her parents’ separation and his death? She hopes, at the very least, that the story she is writing—this novel—will take some steps in that direction.
Tea time à New Delhi - Jean-Pol Hecq
Bengali
During the summer of 1959, Ernesto “Che” Guevara paid an official visit to New Delhi to establish diplomatic relations between Cuba and the non-aligned countries that Nehru was trying to unite. He wanted to sell them sugar, and to buy weapons to defend themselves against the American threat.
At this time of heightened international tensions—Tibet in rebellion against Chinese occupation, Vietnam on the brink of war, India threatened by Pakistan and China—, the United States and the USSR were silently clashing through their intelligence services. Che Guevara was an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi—his childhood idol—and of Nehru. But the meeting with the latter was disappointing. Indira, Nehru’s daughter, a beautiful, intelligent, educated, and French-speaking 41-year-old, and Ernesto, 31, also educated and fluent in French, felt a mutual fascination, to the point that the future leader of India encouraged the guerrilla fighter to meet the philosopher Krishnamurti.
We know that Indira and Che met during this visit. But what could they have said to each other? A mystery! A mystery that leaves the field wide open for a fictional tale steeped in history and adventure, with American agents setting trap after trap for the Cubans while their Russian and Indian counterparts strive to protect them.