Bernard Minier Biography
Bernard Minier, a former customs official, grew up in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. His novels, often set against stark landscapes, delve into the darker aspects of the human psyche and the tension between good and evil. Minier excels at crafting atmosphere and suspense, drawing readers into gripping narratives. His work has garnered international acclaim, praised for its psychological depth and chilling realism.
Bernard Minier was born in Béziers, grew up in the southwest of France and spent his childhood in the Pyrenees. He studied at the University of Toulouse, where the main character of his thrillers, Martin Servaz, comes from. He has lived near Paris for more than twenty years, is married, has two children and writes full-time.
His first novel, Mráz (Frost, Glacé, 2011), has been translated into several languages, including English, and has been particularly successful in France and Germany. Frost became a bestseller in France immediately after its publication, with sales of over 300,000 copies it was also a book sensation of 2012 and won the prestigious Crime Novel Award in Cognac for 2012. The rights to the book have been sold to more than ten countries, including the USA and Germany. The British weekly The Sunday Times ranked Frost among the 50 best crime novels in the world of the last five years. Foreign media compare the oppressive atmosphere of the book and the gradually escalating story with the vigor of the sophistication of the books with the immortal Hannibal Lecter. In the Czech Republic, this novel was published by XYZ in January 2015.
The next two volumes of this series, La Cercle, 2012 (published in Czech as Kruh, XYZ, 2015) and N ́éteins pas la Lumiere, 2014 (published in Czech as Darkness, 2016) also had an extraordinary response around the world. In 2017, his novel Une putain d'histoire (The Fucking Story) was published. The fourth installment of the series with criminologist Martin Servaz called Nuit was published in 2017 (in Czech Noc, published in 2018 by XYZ Publishing). The fifth sequel, entitled Soeurs, was published in Czech as Sisters in 2018, in the Czech Republic in 2019. The sixth volume of La Vallée was published by the author in 2020 (in Czech Údolí, 2021). The last episode is the seventh from 2021 called La Chasse (2021)
In 2019, he published the novel M, le bord de ľabîme (published in Czech as On the Edge of the Abyss, 2020), where he focuses on the possible dangerous development of artificial intelligence.