Serge Joncour

Serge Joncour is a French novelist born in 1961 in Paris. He has been publishing fiction since the late 1990s and is one of the most reliable presences on the French literary scene, consistently producing well-crafted novels that blend narrative pleasure with more serious thematic concerns. His work often explores tensions between nature and civilization, progress and loss. Joncour is the author of more than a dozen novels including L'idole (2004) and Combien de fois je t'aime (2008). He is known for novels that are accessible and emotionally engaging without sacrificing literary ambition, a combination that has earned him both critical respect and a large popular readership. Nature humaine (Human Nature), his 2020 Prix Femina winner, is set on a farm in the Lot region of France between 1976 and 1999, following a farming family across a period of enormous technological change. The novel is both an intimate family drama and a meditation on modernity, ecology, and the transformation of the French countryside. Joncour is celebrated as a writer who gives equal attention to landscape and character, and Nature humaine is considered one of his finest achievements — a humane, beautifully observed novel about the price of progress.