Lydie Salvayre

Lydie Salvayre is a French novelist and psychiatrist born in 1948 in Auterive, Haute-Garonne, to parents who fled the Spanish Civil War. Her work is characterized by dark humor, linguistic experimentation, and an unflinching engagement with violence, power, and trauma. She worked for many years as a psychiatrist, an experience that deeply informs her fiction. Salvayre is the author of more than a dozen novels, including La Déclaration (1990), La Compagnie des spectres (1997), and Pas pleurer (2014). Her writing moves between savage comedy and profound pathos, often using polyphonic voices and fragmentary structures to destabilize conventional narratives. Pas pleurer, her 2014 Prix Goncourt winner, is a formally inventive novel that interweaves the narrator's own voice with passages in the Castilian-inflected French of her mother, who witnessed the Spanish Civil War as a young woman. The novel draws on the testimonies of Georges Bernanos, who wrote against the Nationalist atrocities he observed in Mallorca. Salvayre's work has been widely translated and she is regarded as one of the most original and politically committed voices in contemporary French literature.