Yannick Haenel

Yannick Haenel (b. 1967, Rennes, France) is a French novelist, essayist, and editor who lives in Paris. Agrégé de lettres modernes, he taught at the Lycée La Bruyère in Versailles until 2005, when he left the profession to devote himself entirely to writing. He is the founder and editor of the Gallimard collection and revue Aventures, co-founded and continues to edit the literary journal Ligne de risque with François Meyronnis, and contributes regularly to Charlie Hebdo.

His fiction draws on history, testimony, and mystical traditions to produce novels in which the ethical stakes of language and silence are central. Cercle (2007) won the Prix Décembre. Jan Karski (2009) — based on the wartime messenger who attempted to bring news of the Holocaust to the Allies — received the Prix du Récit politique and the Prix Ulysse and, though it generated controversy in France and the United States, raised fundamental questions about the literary representation of historical witness. Les Renards pâles (2013), set during the occupation of the Trocadéro, and Tiens ferme ta couronne (2017), Prix Médicis, extended his engagement with cinema, writing, and metaphysical resistance. Painting constitutes another sustained axis of his work: La Solitude Caravage (2019), centered on the fugitive life of the painter, received wide critical attention; Bleu Bacon (Stock, 2024) records a night spent alone with the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Centre Pompidou as an initiatory encounter with colour, violence, and the living force of paint; and Pierre Bonnard. Le feu des solitudes charnelles (L'Atelier contemporain, 2024) meditates on the sensuality and luminous obsession of Bonnard's nudes. His commitment to bearing witness also found expression in Janvier 2015 (Les Échappés, 2021), a day-by-day account of the trial of the January 2015 attacks, written for Charlie Hebdo in daily instalments during the proceedings and conceived as a literary monument to the victims.

He is a singular presence in French letters for his insistence on literature as an act of spiritual and political commitment.