Claudie Hunzinger

Claudie Hunzinger is a French novelist and artist born in 1941 in Sélestat, Alsace. She is one of the oldest major winners of a French literary prize in recent years. She and her partner have lived for decades in a remote house in the Vosges mountains, and this intimacy with wilderness, solitude, and the non-human world permeates her fiction. Hunzinger published several books between 1978 and 2000, then fell silent for many years before returning with Bambois, la vie verte (2012) and Les Grands cerfs (2019), which won the Prix du roman de l'Académie Française. Her late work has brought her the recognition that eluded her earlier career. Un chien à ma table (A Dog at My Table), her 2022 Prix Femina winner, is a novel about an aging writer living in the woods with her companion and a stray dog, reflecting on art, nature, and the approach of death. The novel is meditative, precise, and shot through with a rare quality of attention to the living world. Hunzinger is celebrated as a writer who has pursued a radically singular artistic path, and her late-career recognition has brought deserved attention to a body of work of exceptional originality and beauty.