Jérôme GARCIN

Normandy is a familiar land to Jérôme Garcin. A great-grandfather from Rouen gave him his Norman roots. The summers of his childhood, in the Bessin, on the beach of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, have trodden and dug the sand still full of vestiges of this year 44 when it was renamed: Omaha Beach. In the early 1980s, he experienced the Mediterranean beaches from the house in Ramatuelle acquired by Gérard Philipe, his wife Anne-Marie Philipe's father who died too soon. In the early 1990s, he returned to Normandy, at the request of Anne-Marie Philipe, to rediscover the expanses and lights of the great Belgian beaches of his youth. It is at first, in Trouville, then in the Pays d'Auge, that Jérôme Garcin also reconnects with the horse, a passion which gives him the taste to write for himself. For the one who was a journalist at 19 years old and a writer, in 1992, at 36 years old: "I needed Normandy and the horse to write late. Since then, in Normandy, the rider and the writer are one and the same.

For the host-producer of Le Masque et la Plume, enjoying Deauville also means sharing its cultural offerings and the town's historical relationship with horses. These two passions come together in the evenings, in April and August, during the concerts of Deauville's two classical music festivals. In the ideal acoustics of the Salle Elie de Brignac, devoted to horse sales, where the musicians make the hair of their bows sing. Since 2004, a Book Fair, now a 3-day literary festival, gathers and celebrates every year in May, writers who have a relationship with music. On this occasion, a prize "Books & Music of Deauville" is awarded each year by a jury of writers and musicians chaired by Jérôme Garcin.