Nicolas Mathieu

Nicolas Mathieu is a French novelist born in 1978 in Épinal, in the Lorraine region. He grew up in the industrial valleys of the Vosges, and this working-class landscape permeates his fiction, which is marked by an unflinching social realism and a tender attentiveness to the lives of those left behind by deindustrialization. His debut novel Aux animaux la guerre (2014) was adapted for a French television series. His second novel, Leurs enfants après eux (And Their Children After Them), won the Prix Goncourt in 2018. Set in a fictional industrial town in Lorraine during the summers of 1992 to 1998, it follows a group of young people navigating adolescence amid economic decline, drawing comparisons to Flaubert and Zola. Mathieu has spoken extensively about his ambition to write about the French working class with the same literary seriousness that French fiction has historically reserved for bourgeois protagonists. His work has been compared to the American novels of Richard Russo and the British fiction of Jonathan Coe. His subsequent work Connemara (2022) continued his exploration of provincial France and social mobility, further cementing his status as one of the most important social novelists in contemporary French literature.