Christophe Boltanski

Christophe Boltanski is a French journalist and writer born in 1963 in Paris. He is the nephew of the celebrated artist Christian Boltanski and grandson of a distinguished family of French Jewish intellectuals. He has been an award-winning foreign correspondent, covering crises in Africa and the Middle East for the newspaper Libération and later for Le Nouvel Observateur. La Cache (The Safe House), his 2015 Prix Femina winner, is an intimate family memoir centered on his family's apartment on the rue de Grenelle in Paris, where his grandparents went into hiding during the Nazi occupation. The book is an extraordinary excavation of family memory, using the cramped physical space of the apartment as a metaphor for the hidden life and trauma of a Jewish family under threat. The book was Boltanski's literary debut and represented a departure from journalism toward something more personally exploratory. It was praised for its precision, restraint, and the way it uses material objects and domestic space to illuminate larger historical traumas. Boltanski is a significant figure in contemporary French literary nonfiction, and La Cache remains one of the most celebrated memoirs published in France in the 2010s.