Marie NDiaye

author, playwright, and screenwriter

Marie NDiaye (1967) is a French author, playwright, and screenwriter. She was born in France to a French mother and a Senegalese father. She published her first novel at the age of seventeen, and she has since established herself as one of the most prominent authors in contemporary French literature. Her prose is marked by a disturbing atmosphere, psychological precision, and a constant questioning of the certainties of family, identity, and ancestry. She won the Prix Femina for her book Rosie Carpe (2004) and garnered even greater acclaim, including the Prix Goncourt, for her book Three Strong Women (2013), a novelistic triptych about the fates of three heroines linked by the experiences of migration, humiliation, and uprooting. Her book Ladivine (2016) was nominated for the International Booker Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and the International Dublin Literary Award, and the English translation of her novel The Witch (2026), originally published in French in 1996, was recently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has written more than twenty books, including novels, short stories, plays, and children’s literature.