Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal (b. 1967, Toulon, France) is a French novelist who lives and works in Paris. She studied philosophy and cultural mediation in Paris before working in publishing. She publishes with Éditions Verticales / Gallimard.

Her early novels established a practice in which precise, granular attention to specific professional and material worlds — shipbuilding, surfing, geological surveying — becomes the medium for larger questions about labor, community, and the body in time. Corniche Kennedy (2008) received the Prix Médicis. Réparer les vivants (2014), which follows a heart transplant across twenty-four hours and through multiple perspectives, received the Prix du roman FNAC and the Wellcome Book Prize, and was adapted for the stage and screen; it has been translated into more than twenty languages and is among the most widely read French novels of the decade. À ce stade de la nuit (2015) and Kiruna (2019) extended her investigation of place, movement, and industrial culture. Canoë (2023) is her most recent collection of novellas. Her prose, with its long, syntactically ambitious sentences and its sustained attention to technical vocabulary and embodied experience, has been identified as one of the distinctive voices of contemporary French fiction.