Photo Astrid di Crollalanza
My fourth novel and English debut La Louisiane and Pelican Girls, which I wrote both in English and in French, will be respectively published by HarperCollins on March 5, 2024 in the United States and January 3, 2024 in France by éditions Stock. This novel is currently being translated in more than 20 languages.
I was fifteen when my first novel was published in France. In 2010, La fiancée de Tocqueville (ed. Balland) was awarded the Prix des Lycéens of the Salon du Livre du Touquet. This historical novel was followed by two other fiction books, Themoé (ed. Balland, 2013) nominated for the Prix du Jury of the same book fair, and Les fantômes de Christopher D. (ed. Fayard, 2016). In 2015, I won La Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 Writing Contest.
After graduating from Sciences Po Paris and La Sorbonne in social sciences and modern literature, I started writing fiction in English at the Claremont Colleges in California and then in Oregon State University’s creative writing graduate program. I received my Master of Fine Arts in fiction in June 2017. My work in English has appeared in The Chicago Quarterly Review.
After teaching at Oregon State University, I designed four creative writing courses for Sciences Po Paris. I have been teaching fiction to Sciences Po undergraduate and graduate students both in Paris and Normandy since 2018.
I work as a translator for Les Belles Lettres Publishing house, for whom I translated several memoirs including John Steinbeck’s Bombs Away (2018) and Evelyn Waugh’s war diaries (2019). More recently, I translated Steven Moore’s war memoir The Longer We Were There, which won AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2018; my translation was released by Les Belles Lettres in April 2021.
Otherwise I obsessively wear the same shoes for six months (tearing a hole in my DocMartens, done), I’m too lazy to take off my bike helmet in grocery stores, and I compulsively make collages before Christmas to turn into an annual wall calendar.
