Christine Angot

Christine Angot (b. 1959, Châteauroux, France) is a French novelist and playwright whose work, developed since the late 1980s, has been central to the French tradition of autofiction — a form of writing in which the categories of autobiography and fiction are deliberately fused and destabilized.

Her most widely read early work, L'Inceste (1999), addressed the incestuous relationship imposed on her by her biological father, in a text that broke with literary convention in both subject and form, generating sustained controversy and critical debate. The books that followed — Quitter la ville (2000), Pourquoi le Brésil? (2002), Le Marché des amants (2008), among others — continued to work within the same unstable territory between lived experience and literary construction, with the author's name and biography functioning simultaneously as subject and device. Une semaine de vacances (2012) and L'Usage de la vie have extended this investigation. Le Voyage dans l'Est (2021) received the Prix Renaudot.

Angot has also written for the theater and contributed to cinema, including her collaboration with Jacques Doillon on Un amour de jeunesse and the script for Claire Denis's Un beau soleil intérieur (2017). Her influence on French literary culture has been substantial, both for the formal innovations of her prose and for her insistence on subjects that French fiction had largely avoided.