Muriel Barbery (born 28 May 1969) is a French novelist and philosophy teacher. [1] Her 2006 novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog quickly sold more than a million copies in several countries.
Muriel Barbery (born 28 May 1969) is a French novelist and philosophy teacher. [1] Her 2006 novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog quickly sold more than a million copies in several countries.
Barbery was born in Casablanca, Morocco, but she and her parents moved when she was two months old. She studied at the Lycée Lakanal, entered the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud in 1990 and obtained her agrégation in philosophy in 1993. She then taught philosophy at the Université de Bourgogne, in a lycée , and at the Saint-Lô IUFM (teacher training college). After she quit her job, she lived in 2008–2009 in Japan. She currently lives in Europe.
Her novel L'Élégance du hérisson (translated by Alison Anderson as The Elegance of the Hedgehog ) topped the French bestseller lists for 30 consecutive weeks [2] and was reprinted 50 times, selling over a million copies by May 2008. [3] It has also been a bestseller in Italy, Germany, Spain, South Korea, and in many other countries. The story concerns the inhabitants of a small upper-class Paris apartment block, notably its crypto-intellectual concierge, Renée. She and Paloma, the likewise intellectual (even radical) teenage daughter of a resident family, narrate the book in turn. Renée also features briefly in Barbery's first novel, Une Gourmandise , which appeared in Anderson's English translation as Gourmet Rhapsody in 2009. [4]
The Elegance of the Hedgehog was turned into a 2009 film called Le Hérisson (in English The Hedgehog ), directed by Mona Achache.
Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française, in 1980. In 1965, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
ComteJean Bruno Wladimir François-de-Paule Lefèvre d'Ormesson was a French writer and novelist. He authored forty books, was the director of Le Figaro from 1974 to 1977, as well as the dean of the Académie Française, to which he was elected in 1973, until his death, in addition to his service as president of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies within UNESCO (1992–1997).
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a novel by the French novelist and philosophy teacher Muriel Barbery. The book follows events in the life of a concierge, Renée Michel, whose deliberately concealed intelligence is uncovered by an unstable but intellectually precocious girl named Paloma Josse. Paloma is the daughter of an upper-class family living in the Parisian hôtel particulier where Renée works.
Laurence Cossé is a French writer, who published mainly novels.
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The Hedgehog is a French film directed by Mona Achache, loosely based on the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Made in 2008, the film was released in theatres in 2009.
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Mona Achache is a French-Moroccan film director, screenwriter, and actress. She wrote and directed the feature films The Hedgehog (2009), Les Gazelles (2014), Valiant Hearts (2021), and Little Girl Blue (2023). She also directed the Netflix documentary The Women and the Murderer (2021). In 2024, she was nominated for the César Award for Best Documentary Film for Little Girl Blue.
Catherine Cusset is a best-selling French novelist and the author of Life of David Hockney: A Novel, The Story of Jane, and 12 other novels published by Éditions Gallimard between 1990 and 2018. Some of her novels are described as autofiction, a French literary movement that is a hybrid of fiction and autobiography. Others are more romantic, but all share some recurring themes: the family, desire, and cultural conflicts between France and America. She stands out from her contemporaries with a direct, incisive, visual form of writing, marked by the influence of Anglo-Saxon novelists.
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Christelle Dabos is a French author best known for The Mirror Visitor quartet, a fantasy series that has sold over a million copies at Gallimard Jeunesse and has been translated into twenty different languages. Dabos achieved success when her debut novel, A Winter's Promise, was awarded first place at the 2013 Gallimard-RTL-Télérama First Novel competition.
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