Andreï Makine

Andreï Makine (born in Krasnoyarsk, Soviet Union, in 1957) is a French novelist of Russian origin who has written in French since the late 1980s. Born in the Soviet Union, he became one of the most widely read French-language novelists of his generation, and in 2016 he was elected to the Académie Française.

He grew up in Penza, about 700 kilometres south-east of Moscow, and learned French and some familiarity with France from his French-born grandmother. He studied in Kalinin, now Tver, and earned a doctorate with a thesis on French literature at Moscow State University. He also taught philosophy in Novgorod. In 1987 he went to France as part of a teacher exchange programme and chose to stay. He was granted political asylum and set out to make his living as a writer in French. Publishers were skeptical that a newly arrived exile could write so fluently in a second language, so he first presented his manuscripts as translations from Russian.

His novel Le Testament français appeared in 1995 and won both the Goncourt and the Médicis, as well as the Goncourt des Lycéens. His books reconstruct lives shaped by war and revolution, and they return often to exile, nostalgia, childhood memory and the difficulty of passing on a language and a history. Between 2001 and 2011 he also published four novels under the name Gabriel Osmonde. The author's identity remained a mystery until a scholar linked one of these books to his earlier work, and Makine confirmed it. His legacy lies in showing that a language learned in adulthood can support literature of the first rank.