Neige Sinno

Neige Sinno is a French writer born in 1977 in Gap. She has lived and worked in Mexico, where she translates literature and teaches. Her work engages with questions of language, translation, and the difficulty of bearing witness to trauma. Triste Tigre (Sad Tiger), her 2023 Prix Femina winner, is a non-fiction novel — or novelistic memoir — about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather throughout her childhood. The book is remarkable not only for its subject matter but for the way it addresses it: with unflinching clarity, intellectual rigor, and a constant meta-awareness of the limitations and possibilities of language to capture such an experience. The book draws on a wide range of literary references, from Nabokov to Zola, as Sinno interrogates what literature can and cannot do with stories of abuse. It won the Prix Femina, the Prix du Livre Inter, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. An English translation by Natasha Lehrer was published in 2024. Triste Tigre is considered one of the most important French literary works of recent years, a book that reshaped conversations about survivor testimony, trauma writing, and the responsibilities of literature.