François-Henri Désérable

François-Henri Désérable (b. 1987, Amiens, France) is a French novelist who trained as a professional ice hockey player before turning to writing. He studied law and literature in Paris and publishes with Gallimard.

His fiction is characterized by a mode of writing that fuses biography with invention, approaching historical and literary figures with formal rigor and narrative freedom. Évariste (2015) reconstructed the life of the mathematician Évariste Galois; Un certain M. Piekielny (2017), drawing on a brief passage in Romain Gary's autobiography La Promesse de l'aube, pursued the identity of a minor character whom Gary had promised to remember — a project that became a meditation on memory, testimony, and the literary act. The novel received the Prix de la Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. Mon maître et mon vainqueur (2021), a love story and a study of obsession, received the Prix de la SCAM. His subsequent novel, La Nuit du volcan (2023), moved to a volcanic island setting. His work has been translated into several languages and reaches readers through a distinctive blend of erudition, irony, and narrative playfulness.