Miguel Bonnefoy

Miguel Bonnefoy is a French-Venezuelan novelist born in 1986 in Paris to a Chilean father and a Venezuelan mother. He grew up in France and studied literature in Paris. His fiction is marked by a magical-realist sensibility rooted in Latin American literary traditions, combined with the precision of the French literary novel. Bonnefoy published his debut novel Sucre noir (Sugar Money) in 2017 to considerable acclaim. His subsequent novels, including Le voyage d'Octavio (2015) and Héritage (2020), established him as one of the most gifted young voices in French literature, bringing the sensibility of García Márquez and Rulfo into dialogue with French literary craft. Le rêve du jaguar (The Jaguar's Dream), his 2024 Prix Femina winner, is a multigenerational saga set in Venezuela, following a family across the twentieth century against the backdrop of the country's oil wealth and political upheavals. The novel was praised for its lush prose, its narrative sweep, and its tender engagement with a Latin American family's history. Bonnefoy represents one of the most exciting intersections in contemporary French fiction — the meeting of Latin American literary tradition with the Francophone novel — and Le rêve du jaguar confirmed him as a major talent.