Nathalie Azoulai

Nathalie Azoulai (b. 1966, Paris) is a French novelist whose fiction draws on classical literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary emotional life to construct narratives of great formal precision. She teaches at the Université Paris VIII and publishes with P.O.L.

Her novels include Les Manifestations (2005), Les Spectateurs (2012), and Toute une moitié du monde (2018). Her most widely read work, Titus n'aimait pas Bérénice (2015), which received the Prix Médicis, is a novel in which a contemporary woman's love affair provides the occasion for a meditation on Racine's Bérénice and the history of literary passion — moving between the seventeenth century and the present, between critical analysis and narrative, with the boundaries between the two kept deliberately unstable. Her work has been translated into several languages.

She is also a literary essayist and contributes to cultural journalism and programming