French author and playwright Marie NDiaye, whose novel The Witch was shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize, will offer a glimpse into her magical-realist literary universe in an interview with Guillaume Basset. They will discuss not only The Witch but also her novel Three Strong Women, winner of the 2009 Prix Goncourt. The book’s English translation was also a finalist for the 2014 International Dublin Literary Award.

Marie NDiaye 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.

Guillaume Basset is a French writer who lives in Prague. He is currently the programme director of the international book fair and literary festival Book World Prague. In the past he was the deputy director of the Prague Writers’ Festival and worked for the Alliance Française de Lyon. He also gained experience in the field while organising a literary festival in Hong Kong. He has published poems in the French magazines Mercure liquide, Verso, Provisoire, and Zone. His first work, The Fire of Your Closeness (Oheň tvých blízkostí, 2017), was published bilingually in Czech and the original French by the publishing house Dauphin.