Didier Van Cauwelaert

Didier Van Cauwelaert (born in Nice, 1960) is a French novelist, playwright and screenwriter, and one of the most widely read contemporary authors in France. He is best known abroad for winning the Prix Goncourt in 1994.

He was a precocious writer: at eight he was already sending manuscripts to Paris publishers, without success. He never completed his literary studies and earned a living from odd jobs, teaching windsurfing and singing, while acting in amateur theatre and trying, with little luck, to work as a critic. His first novel, Vingt ans et des poussières (1982), won the Prix Del Duca, and his career gained momentum until the Goncourt for One-Way, a bittersweet comedy about a fake Moroccan emigrant and a cultural attaché just abandoned by his wife.

His style mixes humour, tenderness and generosity, with characters who are either unusual or so ordinary they surprise. Many of his protagonists struggle with identity, often because of the absence of a father figure. An admirer of Marcel Aymé and Romain Gary, he wrote a large body of work that reached a broad readership, even though his plots are quickly forgotten.