She has been hailed as the literary queen of the Paris techno scene, whose cult novel Superstars immortalised the hedonism and rivalry of the sweat-drenched dancefloors and rave parties of 1990s France. But if the novelist Ann Scott, the winner of last month’s prestigious Renaudot prize, so poetically chronicled Paris’s generation X, from queer clubs to hard house, it was also because her own backstory gave a unique insight on what it was to be part of the underground.
Sent by her well-meaning Paris parents to England’s Shoreham-by-Sea in 1977 aged 12 “to speak English and play tennis” for the summer, she ran away from her host family to hang out on Kings Road in London with bands. Each summer she would repeat the same act of rebellion; by age 13 she’d been offered heroin by some of London’s biggest punk rockers. By 15 she was drumming in a band, at 16 was a skinhead, and by 18 she was modelling in London for designers such as John Galliano and being photographed for shoots in magazines like i-D and the Face. “Fashion was changing every year,” Scott reminisces. “You could just be anything.”
