Amélie Nothomb

Amélie Nothomb is a Belgian novelist who writes in French and is one of the most widely read authors in that language today. Her books, published since the early 1990s, mix humour, cruelty and a deliberately estranged view of the world, and her name has become a recognisable brand within European postmodern fiction.

She was born in Etterbeek, in Brussels, though the date is not agreed upon: 1966 is the usual figure, but the author herself has said she was born in Kobe in 1967. The daughter of a Belgian diplomat, she grew up moving from post to post, living in Japan, China, the United States, Laos, Burma and Bangladesh. In Japan she attended a local school and learned Japanese, a skill that later allowed her to work as an interpreter in Tokyo. Before that she had studied Romance philology at the Université libre de Bruxelles, where she felt like an outsider, partly because of the weight her surname carried in Belgian society.

Her time working for a large Japanese company became the basis of Fear and Trembling, a novel about workplace humiliation written with savage irony. Her debut, Hygiene and the Assassin, appeared in 1992 and began a steady output: she has since published roughly one novel a year, usually in August, and she still writes by hand in the early hours of the morning.

Her books tend to revolve around a confrontation, either between two characters or between a character and a situation. Some, such as Péplum or Cosmetics of the Enemy, are built almost entirely as dialogue. She is drawn to the monstrous, the grotesque and the extreme, and handles the absurd with considerable skill. She has spoken openly about a possible autism or Asperger syndrome, a trait many readers connect with the unusual way she observes other people. Her upbringing in a strictly Catholic family runs through much of her autobiographical work, Antichrist among them, though these novels blur life and fiction and should be read with that in mind.

Her legacy is that of a successful author with a loyal readership and institutional recognition. She received the Grand Prix du roman of the Académie française in 1999 for Fear and Trembling, the Prix Renaudot in 2021 for Premier sang, and in 2015 she was elected to the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature in Belgium. Her provocative tone divides opinion, yet few deny that she is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary French-language writing.