Marie Darrieussecq

Marie Darrieussecq (Bayonne, 1969) is a French writer, essayist, and translator, and one of the most prominent contemporary authors of French literature. She completed her PhD with a dissertation on autobiography and autofiction in the works of Georges Perec, Michel Leiris, Serge Doubrovsky, and Hervé Guibert, and went on to teach at the University of Lille. She has spent extended periods in Australia and the United States and currently lives in Paris. Her work has been translated into more than forty languages.

She first came to international prominence with her debut novel, Pig Tales (1996), a satirical and fantastical story about a woman who begins to transform into a pig. The novel has sold more than one million copies worldwide and has been translated into around forty languages. Her work is characterized by themes of identity, the body, motherhood, loss, memory, and the boundaries between reality and fantasy, combining psychological insight, poetic sensibility, and irony. She is the author of the novels Tom Is Dead (2007), a harrowing account of a mother confronting the loss of her child; Men (2013), a novel about love, racial prejudice, and the film industry; Our Life in the Forest (2017), a dystopian vision of the future that explores the relationship between humanity, technology, and freedom; Crossed Lines (2019), a novel addressing migration and contemporary moral dilemmas; and How to Make a Woman (2024), a novel about growing up, female identity, and the formation of the self.

She is the recipient of the Prix du jeune écrivain de langue française (1988, Young French-Language Writer’s Prize, for the short story “The Hiker”), the Prix Médicis (2013), the Prix des Prix (2013), and the Prix CIÉF (2020), awarded by the Centre international d’études francophones (International Centre for Francophone Studies). Her novels Pig Tales and Our Life in the Forest, her book The Baby, and her collection of essays Police Report have been published in Serbian. In Police Report, she examines the phenomenon of literary plagiarism through ten essays, one of which is devoted to Danilo Kiš and the controversy surrounding A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.