The Writers of Wales Database

BONNIN, JEAN

Website: www.jeanbonnin.com

Jean Bonnin was born in the south of France to a French father and a Welsh mother. At the age of four, Jean and his family returned to the birthplace of his mother: Saundersfoot in Pembrokeshire. Jean studied for his first degree in Government and Politics at Birmingham, he took his Masters in Political Philosophy at Hull University, and his doctoral research was on the theories of despotism.

In 1992, after completing his studies, he lived and worked in France, Portugal, Ireland, and Germany. Then he returned to Pembrokeshire for a short while, before heading off for six months of travelling around Mexico, Central America, and Cuba. And it was during this period, whilst travelling, that he completed the first draft of his first published novel: A Certain Experience of the Impossible (Firecrest Fiction, 2009).

His mysterious stories come, he believes, from a combination of his academic studies, his travels, and the evocative expeditions his family went on when he was a teenager. They visited the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and East Berlin.

During the ten years Jean spent living abroad he was involved with numerous music groups, and released several albums. He is still involved with making music, but no longer plays live. At present Jean is half way through the first draft of his sixth manuscript. He is making final adjustments to the other manuscripts, which he has written over a ten year period. Jean lives and writes in South Pembrokeshire, where he spends two-thirds of the year; the remaining third he spends with friends in France.

Selected Publications:
A Certain Experience of the Impossible (Firecrest Fiction, 2009)
Lines Within The Circle (Red Egg Publishing, 2012)


A Certain Experience of the Impossible (Firecrest Fiction, 2009)

Has Harold Pinter collided with the Priory of Sion,
in this strange tale?
Or has Jean Baudrillard met his fate
at the hands of Dennis Wheatley?
Perhaps Paul Auster has been accosted
by the Third Policeman?

A dazed man crosses England by night in an inscrutable luxury car. Hardly knowing who he is or where he’s going, he feels he might have been awake for a thousand years. Then, at a grand and desolate mansion where he chances to call, he stumbles on a gathering of strangers, whose welcome is as effusive as it is baffling…

Decades of scholarly research, planning, and calculation have gone into this meeting which, those present are convinced, will change their lives forever - perhaps even alter the very nature of time and being.

Now they are ready for the final act of their long drama. Instead they hear another story. Not of metaphysics, but of a Chinaman, a whore, and perhaps a murder in a Mediterranean marina; of an innocent girl sent on a pilgrimage to some unknown end across the blistering North African desert; of
the ancient, unique Senua Codex; of artists and philosophers and savants précieux in smoky Parisian cafés; of a desperate search for a seductress with a leather-bound notebook; of a CIA assassin working for the KGB…
 
At the heart of it all is the enigmatic Martin. But is he mad, blessed, or cursed? Or exactly what he says he is?
 

Lines Within the Circle (Red Egg Publishing, 2012)

This, Jean Bonnin's second novel, is a wonderfully written piece about an intriguing road trip.
From Oxford in the UK, through France and Spain, to Portugal - and later ending up in Berlin and the former East Germany… Interesting people are discussed and met along the way: from Salvador Dali, to a self-assured Icelandic hitchhiker. In one respect this is the story about a man on a strange journey who is thinking about the life he's led, in another respect it's about something much bigger… It's about the loss of idealism, and the loss of ideology.