Yasmina Reza

Yasmina Reza is a French playwright, novelist, and actress born in 1959 in Paris to a Jewish Hungarian mother and an Iranian father. She is best known internationally as a playwright, with Art (1994) becoming one of the most performed plays in the world. Her plays, which include Le Dieu du carnage (God of Carnage, 2006), are known for their sharp wit and their excavation of bourgeois anxieties. As a novelist, Reza has written a series of acerbic, formally inventive books including Une désolation (1999), Adam Haberberg (2003), and L'Aube le soir ou la nuit (2007), a fly-on-the-wall account of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential campaign. Her fiction shares the theatrical economy and savage intelligence of her plays. Babylone, her 2016 Prix Renaudot winner, is a dark comedy narrated by a woman who witnesses her neighbor kill his wife at a garden party. The novel unfolds as a social satire of Parisian bourgeois life, punctuated by flashes of violence and grief. Reza occupies an unusual position in French culture as a figure of both high literary prestige and popular success. Her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages.