Simon Liberati

Simon Liberati is a French novelist and journalist born in 1960 in Paris. He worked for many years as a literary journalist and critic before publishing his debut novel California Girls in 2010. His fiction is known for its lush, provocative prose and its fascination with celebrity, glamour, decadence, and transgression. Liberati won the Prix Femina in 2011 for Jayne Mansfield 1967, a novelistic account of the actress's final days. His work consistently engages with the mythology of Hollywood and American popular culture, filtered through a distinctly French literary sensibility. Performance, his 2022 Prix Renaudot winner, is a fictionalized account of the life of the New York avant-garde scene, exploring the relationship between art and self-destruction. The novel draws on real figures from performance art while constructing a narrative about the costs of radical artistic commitment. Liberati is a celebrated and sometimes controversial figure in French literary culture, admired for his stylistic excess and his refusal of literary respectability.