Laurent Binet | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 19 July 1972 Paris, France |
| Occupation | Writer, University lecturer |
| Education | Literature |
| Alma mater | University of Paris |
Laurent Binet (born 19 July 1972) is a French writer and university lecturer. His work focuses on the modern political scene in France.
The son of a historian, [1] Laurent Binet was born in Paris. He graduated from the University of Paris with a degree in Literature. He spent four years singing and playing guitar with a rock band named Stalingrad. [2] He teaches French in a Paris suburb and also at the University of Saint-Denis.
Binet was awarded the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for his first novel, HHhH . [3] The novel recounts the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.
In August 2012, Binet published Rien ne se passe comme prévu (Nothing goes as planned), a behind-the-scenes account of the successful presidential campaign of François Hollande, which Binet witnessed while embedded with Hollande's campaign staff. In 2015, he published his second novel, La septième fonction du langage, which was translated in 2017 as The Seventh Function of Language, a detective thriller dealing with a fictionalized account of Roland Barthes's death. In 2019, he published Civilizations, an alternative history novel about the conquest of Europe by Atahualpa. The novel was awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 2019 and was published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [4] The English translation won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2022. [5]
The Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". The prize carries a symbolic reward of only 10 euros, but results in considerable recognition and book sales for the winning author. Four other prizes are also awarded: prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle, prix Goncourt de la Poésie (poetry) and prix Goncourt de la Biographie (biography). Of the "big six" French literary awards, the Prix Goncourt is the best known and most prestigious. The other major literary prizes include the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française, the Prix Femina, the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Interallié and the Prix Médicis.
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