Biography in English

Yanick Martin is an Occitan author from Alès, capital city of the Cévennes. His literary career is quite singular. After secondary school in his home town, he becomes dentist surgeon in Montpellier. He practices his profession for thirty years before suddently feeling burned out and falling into the black hole of depression for two years.

When after a couple of years of psychoanalysis he finally finds his way out, he realizes Occitan, the minoritized language of his country, is his true mother tongue and that his disorder is rooted in that fact, the rest of symptoms mere consequences coming from this same origin. Once the cause is well established, acceptance is immediate and the way out is outlined right away: he deserves to recuperate his mother tongue and that's what he owes to his mother tongue. And to help Occitans to overcome the shame to speak their own language, i.e. Occitan.

With the support of his wife, teacher in a public Occitan/French bilimgual school, who's just been appointed pedagogical counsellor of the Department of the Gard, he decides to come back to the University of Montpellier, this time to the Faculty of Letters and start studying Occitan. He has just finished his first year of his master degree.

Lo tust de la lenga (2016) [The clash of the tongue], the poignant account of his process of psychological rebuilding, is his first work. The story discloses, though, a bunch of intriguing characters which would soon find their voice in a new book.