Delphine de Vigan


Delphine de Vigan is an internationally known French novelist who has won several awards.

Life and works

De Vigan wrote her first four novels by night while working at a public opinion firm in Alfortville by day. Her first published work, Jours sans faim, was published under the pseudonym Lou Delvig, although since then she has written under her own name.
Her breakthrough work was No et moi, in which she depicts the life of a young homeless woman from the point of view of a highly gifted thirteen-year-old girl. The book which won the Rotary International Prize in 2009 as well as France's prestigious Prix des libraires. The novel was translated into twenty languages and a film adaptation was released in 2010. Following the book's success, she became a full-time professional writer.
De Vigan's central theme is the trauma and the damage that adult behaviour does to children. In 2011, her novel Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit, which deals with a family coping with a woman's bipolar disorder, won another clutch of French literary prizes, including the prix du roman Fnac, the prix Roman France Télévisions, the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle, and the Prix Renaudot des lycéens.
In 2015, she received the Prix Renaudot as well as the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens for D'après une histoire vraie. In it, the question of what truth or fiction means in the process of writing is addressed. The author befriends an enigmatic woman who slowly becomes more and more like her, while her own ability to write slips away. Roman Polański made a film of the book named Based on a True Story in 2017.
In 2018, her novel Les Loyautés was published, which tells the story of young Theo, who suffers from difficult family circumstances after his parents' divorce. Out of excessive demands, he begins to drink alcohol in large quantities. He falls into a fatal downward spiral, into which he drags his best friend.
In her 2019 novel Les Gratitudes, de Vigan tells of a woman who loses her speech in old age. She thinks back to the couple who rescued her, the child Mishka, from the Nazis at the time, and is increasingly filled with a desire to thank them for it after the fact.
In her most recent novel, The Children Are Kings, Vigan uses a detective story to address the lives of child influencers who are marketed to by their mother on YouTube. The filming of the adaptation of the novel is currently in preparation by Disney+.

Novels

  • Jours sans faim, Éditions Grasset, 2001 ;
  • Les Jolis Garçons, JC Lattès, 2005
  • Un soir de décembre, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2005
  • No et moi, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2007
  • Sous le manteau, Flammarion, 2008
  • Les Heures souterraines, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2009
  • Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2011
  • D'après une histoire vraie, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2015
  • Les Loyautés, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2018
  • Les Gratitudes, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2019
  • Les enfants sont rois, Gallimard, 2021

Screenplays

Les prix