Marie NDiaye


Marie NDiaye is a French novelist, playwright and screenwriter. She published her first novel, Quant au riche avenir, when she was 17. She won the Prix Goncourt in 2009. Her play Papa doit manger is the sole play by a living female writer to be part of the repertoire of the Comédie française. She co-wrote the screenplay for the 2022 legal drama Saint Omer alongside its director Alice Diop, and Amrita David. In September 2022, the film was selected as France's official selection for Academy Award for [Best International Feature Film|Best International Film] at the 95th Academy Awards.

Biography

NDiaye was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, France, to a French mother and a Senegalese father. She grew up with her mother and her brother Pap Ndiaye in the suburbs of Paris. Her parents met as students in the mid-1960s, but her father returned to Senegal when she was one year old.
She began writing at the age of 12. As a senior in high school, she was discovered by Jerome Lindon, founder of Éditions de Minuit, who published her first novel, Quant au riche avenir, in 1985.
She subsequently wrote six more novels, all published by Minuit, and a collection of short stories. She also wrote her Comédie classique, a 200-page novel made up of a single sentence, which was published by Éditions P.O.L in 1988, when she was 21 years old. In addition, NDiaye has written several plays. She co-wrote the screenplay for White Material with director Claire Denis. NDiaye's 2003 drama Papa doit manger is distinguished as the second play by a female writer to be taken into the repertoire of the Comédie française.
In 1998, NDiaye wrote a letter to the press in which she argued that her novel La Sorcière, published two years earlier, had strongly informed the content of Naissance des fantômes, the second novel of successful author Marie Darrieussecq.
Her novel Trois femmes puissantes won the 2009 Prix Goncourt. In his 2013 critical study of the author, Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition, British academic Andrew Asibong describes her as "the epitome of a certain kind of cultural brilliance". In his psychoanalytic exploration of the writer's evocation of trauma and disavowal, he says that "NDiaye's work explores the violence done to the subject's capacity for feeling and knowing".

Exile in Berlin

In an interview published by Les Inrockuptibles on 30 August 2009, NDiaye declared about Sarkozy's France,
"I find that France monstrous. The fact that we have chosen to live in Berlin for two years is far from being unrelated to that. We left just after the elections, in a large part because of Sarkozy, even if I am very aware that saying that can seem snobbish. I find that atmosphere of vulgarity and heavy policing detestable... Besson, Hortefeux, all of those people, I find them monstrous".

Awards and honours

Works

Novels and short stories

  • Quant au riche avenir – Les Editions de Minuit, 1985
  • Comédie classique –, 1988
  • La femme changée en bûche – Minuit, 1989
  • En famille – Minuit, 1991
  • * Translated into English as Among Family by Heather Doyal – Angela Royal Publishing, 1997
  • Un temps de saison – Minuit, 1994
  • * Translated into English as That Time of Year by Jordan Stump – Two Lines Press, 2020
  • La Sorcière – Minuit, 1996
  • * Translated into English as The Witch by Jordan Stump – Vintage, 2026
  • Rosie Carpe – Minuit, Prix Femina 2001
  • * Translated into English as Rosie Carpe by Tamsin Black – Bison Books, 2004
  • Tous mes amis, nouvelles – Minuit, 2004
  • * Translated into English as All My Friends by Jordan Stump – Two Lines Press, 2013
  • Autoportrait en vert – Mercure de France, 2005
  • * Translated into English as Self-Portrait in Green by Jordan Stump – Two Lines Press, 2014
  • Mon cœur a l'etroit – Éditions Gallimard, 2007
  • * Translated into English as My Heart Hemmed In by Jordan Stump – Two Lines Press, 2017
  • Trois femmes puissantes – Gallimard, Prix Goncourt, 2009.
  • * Translated into English as Three Strong Women by John Fletcher – MacLehose Press & Alfred A. Knopf, 2013 ; extracted in New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
  • Ladivine – Gallimard, 2013
  • * Translated into English as Ladivine by Jordan Stump – Alfred A. Knopf, 2016 & MacLehose Press, 2016
  • La Cheffe, roman d'une cuisinière – Gallimard, 2016
  • * Translated into English as The Cheffe by Jordan Stump – Alfred A. Knopf, 2019 & MacLehose Press, 2019
  • La vengeance m’appartient – Gallimard, 2022
  • * Translated into English as Vengeance is Mine by Jordan Stump – Alfred A. Knopf, 2023
  • Le bon Denis – Mercure de France, 2025

Plays

  • Hilda – Minuit, 1999
  • Papa doit manger – Minuit, 2003
  • Rien d'humain – Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2004
  • Les serpents – Minuit, 2004

Children's novels

  • La diablesse et son enfant, illustration Nadja –, 2000
  • Les paradis de Prunelle, illustration Pierre Mornet – Albin Michel Jeunesse, 2003
  • Le souhait, illustration Alice Charbin – École des Loisirs, 2005

Essays

  • La naufragée – Flohic, 1999

Screenplay