French · b. 1967
Marie NDiaye won the Prix Goncourt in 2009 for "Trois femmes puissantes" (Three Strong Women), three linked stories of women refusing to be broken by circumstances. The French-Senegalese author began publishing at seventeen; her work moves between realism and the uncanny, often following characters who find themselves subtly excluded from the social world. NDiaye writes plays as well as fiction and has lived in Berlin for years, maintaining a productive distance from French literary culture.