French · b. 1972
Laurent Gaudé writes about the ancient and the elemental—family honor, Mediterranean light, the weight of the dead on the living. The French novelist's "The House of Scorta" (2004) follows a Calabrian family across generations, from a curse laid on a bastard child to redemption sought in a sun-blasted village. The novel won the Prix Goncourt. Gaudé also writes for the theater, and his fiction carries theatrical intensity: grand gestures, operatic emotions, the sense that everything matters terribly.