Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam

Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam (b. 1966, Marseille) is a French novelist who also writes genre fiction under the pseudonym Rebecca Lighieri. She lives and works in Paris and publishes under both names with P.O.L.

Her fiction under her own name addresses marginality, queerness, religious community, social exclusion, and unconventional models of family and desire, most often through narrators situated at the periphery of mainstream social life. Je suis une aventure (2012) and Je viens (2015) established her as one of the most formally inventive French novelists of her generation. Arcadie (2019), about an adolescent coming of age within an isolated utopian community, received the Prix Femina. La Treizième Heure (2022), which follows a young woman's initiation into a charismatic religious movement, was shortlisted for several major French literary prizes including the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. Her prose is dense, musically rhythmed, and unflinching in its attention to the interior lives of characters who exist against the grain. The novels written as Rebecca Lighieri — including Il est des hommes qui se perdront toujours (2020) — explore genre conventions of thriller and crime fiction while maintaining the same formal seriousness.

She has been a schoolteacher for many years alongside her writing practice.