French novelist
Delphine de Vigan (born 1 March 1966) is an internationally known French novelist who has won several awards.[1]
Life and works
De Vigan wrote her first four novels by night while working at a public opinion firm in Alfortville by day. Her first published work, Jours sans faim (2001), was published under the pseudonym Lou Delvig, although since then she has written under her own name.[2]
Her breakthrough work was No et moi (2007), in which she depicts the life of a young homeless woman from the point of view of a highly gifted thirteen-year-old girl. The book which won the Rotary International Prize[3] in 2009 as well as France's prestigious Prix des libraires.[4] The novel was translated into twenty languages and a film adaptation was released in 2010 (No et moi directed by Zabou Breitman).[2] Following the book's success, she became a full-time professional writer.[5]
De Vigan's central theme is the trauma and the damages that adult behavior does to children. In 2011, her novel Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit (Nothing holds back the night), which deals with a family coping with a woman's bipolar disorder, won another clutch of French literary prizes, including the prix du roman Fnac,[6] the prix Roman France Télévisions,[7] the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle,[8] and the Prix Renaudot des lycéens.[2]
In 2015, she received the Prix Renaudot[9] as well as the Prix Goncourt des lycéens for D'après une histoire vraie (Based on a true story).[10] In it, the question of what truth or fiction means in the process of writing is addressed. The author befriends an enigmatic woman who slowly becomes more and more like her, while her own ability to write slips away. Roman Polański made a film of the book named Based on a True Story in 2017.[11]
In 2018, her novel Les Loyautés (Loyalties) was published, which tells the story of young Theo, who suffers from difficult family circumstances after his parents' divorce. Out of excessive demands, he begins to drink alcohol in large quantities. He falls into a fatal downward spiral, into which he drags his best friend.[12][13]
In her 2019 novel Les Gratitudes (Gratitudes), de Vigan tells of a woman who loses her speech in old age. She thinks back to the couple who rescued her, the child Mishka, from the Nazis at the time, and is increasingly filled with a desire to thank them for it after the fact.[14][15]
In her most recent novel, The Children Are Kings (2022), Vigan uses a detective story to address the lives of child influencers who are marketed to by their mother on YouTube.[16] The filming of the adaptation of the novel is currently in preparation by Disney+.[17]
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