Valérie Manteau

Valérie Manteau is a French novelist born in 1991, one of the youngest writers ever to win a major French literary prize. She studied literature and worked in publishing before publishing her debut novel Calme et tranquille in 2016. Her writing is marked by a poetic, hypnotic prose style and an engagement with violence, memory, and loss. Le Sillon (The Furrow / Shaken), her 2018 Prix Renaudot winner, is a meditation on the 2015 assassination of French journalist Renaud Camus — the novel draws on the real murder of Elif Şahin, a journalist killed in Istanbul — but fictionalizes events through the consciousness of a grieving narrator. Manteau's work occupies the space between elegy and inquiry, using lyrical prose to approach the inassimilable fact of violent death. Her second novel was widely praised for its beauty and moral seriousness. She is one of the most promising writers of her generation in France, celebrated for her refusal of conventional narrative structures and her ability to transform grief into literary form.