LAURANE MARCHIVE

WRITER

I am a French writer and director living in London.

My writing has appeared in various publications and has won and been shortlisted for multiple prizes. In 2020 I was mentored by Max Porter.

My stage work, a mixture of immersive theatre and contemporary circus, has won numerous awards. Time Out called my last production ‘genuinely thrilling’ and What’s On Stage said it was ‘the perfect balance between intimate and epic.’

I am currently writing a novel under representation from C&W.

fiction

the other side of the fog

lickerish library, 2023

for the flesh is sour

spread the word, 2020

just wait for the party

london magazine, 2020

puppy shower

3am magazine, 2020

are there more people alive than dead?

london magazine, 2019

this shaping

spread the word, 2019

EXTRACTS

you scroll back up your instagram feed, stop on that picture of

max

max

max

his smile, teeth showing, spontaneous. his hair is a little bit shorter, he’s wearing a grey t-shirt, something you haven’t seen before. but the smile always the same, generous, unthinking –

you unbutton your coat, casual. loosen the scarf around your neck, from your bag, lipstick a shade darker. the bus is moving again; it’s hard to do it properly. you give your lips the shape of a heart, something tender. head turned towards the yellow light, hand under the cheek. showing no knuckles, knuckles, no knuckles, adjusting.

so that it doesn’t look contrived.

so that it doesn’t look staged.

this shaping

He took the next right. A bigger road. The rain fell in from the side now. A red bus pulled out. When the bus moved to overtake him, Sam tried to accelerate but didn’t accelerate enough. He felt the bike pull and slide. Saw the front of his own wheel swallowed by the wheel of the bus, the mangled sound of twisted metal against granular asphalt. In a very slow, very disconnected spasm, he watched the mirrored reflection of the light slide from under his feet, the green and red and golden lights momentarily forming a celestial vault over his head. Riyad had told them, once, in class, that the words ‘astral’ and ‘disaster’ shared an etymological root. Because in Ancient times, the ills of the world were blamed on the stars.

As the Light Runs Out

EXTRACTS

you wonder which one of your pictures the newspapers would choose if the killer caught you. You wonder if you would put up a fight or if you would just let him do it. If you would ask him to be soft, to sing to you as he slices your throat, because you hate the pain more than the thought of death.

are there more people alive than dead?

I slide one hand under the necklace. The silver is cold. In the holiday home where I spent most summers as a child, a picture of my grandmother wearing the necklace dominated the fireplace mantle. Beautiful, smiling. In control. Unreadable. I’ve often been told I look like her: similar features, similar eyes. I would wear the necklace at the funeral, but it is slightly too tight.

I can never wear it for too long without feeling choked.

For the flesh is sour

2 am. Outside Mikha’s window, the howling is back. A sharp, grey sound, heavy like a scrape. People in the neighbourhood call it ‘The Cow from Hell’. It always comes at night so you can’t really see it, but you can hear it: a great big wounded animal, calling and screeching. As it turns out, it’s just the sound of TFL cleaning the nearby train tracks; they send round this giant mechanical beast that slowly crawls up and down the rails, scraping off the dust, the dirt. Mikha hears it often. But he also knows that TFL can’t be cleaning the tracks that relentlessly.

He tries falling back asleep but his eyes won’t stay closed. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he finds himself glancing at his phone, in case Katie can’t sleep either. In the evenings, she often sends him pictures of herself in her Edinburgh flat. Or pictures of herself with her pet bunny. Or pictures of her bedside lamp when it glows in the night, and the room is dark and the light casts on the wall a shape that looks like a tree.

Milk