Jean-Paul Dubois

Jean-Paul Dubois is a French novelist and journalist born in 1950 in Toulouse. He worked for many years as a reporter for Le Nouvel Observateur, covering North America, and has spent significant time in Canada and the United States, influences that are visible in his fiction's attentiveness to exile, displacement, and the texture of North American life. Dubois is a prolific novelist who has published more than twenty books since the late 1980s. His fiction is known for its elegiac tone, its concern with grief and ordinary lives, and its interest in the quiet dignity of men facing loss. He won the Prix Femina in 2004 for Une vie française. Tous les hommes n'habitent pas le monde de la même façon (All Men Don't Inhabit the World in the Same Way), his 2019 Prix Goncourt winner, is narrated by a French-Canadian man living in a Montreal prison cell, reflecting on his marriage, his faith, and the forces that brought him there. The novel is a meditation on dignity, injustice, and the simple beauty of daily life. Dubois is one of France's most beloved novelists and a two-time Prix Goncourt finalist before his 2019 win. His work is known for its humane warmth and the precision of its emotional intelligence.