Belgian · 1929–2012
Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012) was a Belgian novelist and psychoanalyst, born in Etterbeek to a Jewish family that fled to Casablanca during the Second World War. She trained and practiced for two decades as a psychoanalyst before returning to fiction full-time, eventually publishing more than a dozen novels. Her international reputation rests chiefly on Moi qui nai pas connu les hommes (1995), translated into English as I Who Have Never Known Men, a spare, allegorical novel narrated by a woman raised in an underground cage with no memory of the outside world. The book found a large following decades after its French publication when English-language readers, especially online, rediscovered it as a work of feminist speculative fiction. Harpman also won the Prix Medicis in 1996 for Orlanda. She continued practicing psychoanalysis in Brussels alongside her writing until her death in 2012.