History

The Villa Marguerite Yourcenar is a neo-Norman-style manor house built in the 1930s on the grounds of the former château destroyed during the First World War, where novelist and academician Marguerite Yourcenar lived for the first nine years of her life.

Writing residency

The Villa Marguerite Yourcenar was created in 1997 by the Département du Nord, and is one of its cultural facilities. Every year it welcomes around 20 French and foreign authors, both emerging and established.

A writing residency is a special time in the life of an author.

For the organisers, it has a dual purpose: to allow them to pursue their creative work in peace and quiet, to encourage encounters with local audiences through a variety of activities (meetings, public readings, writing workshops) and to reach out to school audiences and, more broadly, to the general public.

La Villa welcomes three authors each month and organises the programme that accompanies their residency.