Marie-Hélène Lafon

Marie-Hélène Lafon is a French novelist and professor of classical literature born in 1962 in Aurillac, in the Cantal region of central France. She grew up on a farm in the Auvergne and has taught Latin and Greek at a lycée in Paris, a dual identity — rural origins, urban intellectual life — that is at the core of her fiction. Lafon is the author of more than a dozen novels and short story collections, beginning with Le Soir du chien (2001). Her fiction is known for its precise, disciplined prose and its deep attention to the lives of rural people, particularly women living in isolated communities. She is often compared to Flaubert and Maupassant for her classical restraint. Histoire du fils (Story of the Son), her 2020 Prix Renaudot winner, follows a family across four generations and several French provinces, focusing on an illegitimate son whose origins are never fully acknowledged. The novel is spare, compressed, and quietly devastating in its examination of shame, silence, and the weight of family history. Lafon is one of the most admired stylists in contemporary French literature, praised by critics for the way she gives full dignity to lives that literature has often overlooked.