Agota Kristof

Agota Kristof (1935-2011) was a Hungarian-born novelist and playwright who wrote in French. Born at Csikvánd in western Hungary, she fled the country in 1956, after the crushing of the uprising, with her husband and their four-month-old daughter, and settled in Switzerland, where she worked in a watch factory at Fontainemelon. She learned French as an adult and called it an enemy language. Le Grand Cahier (Seuil, 1986) made her name; with La Preuve (1988) and Le Troisième Mensonge (1991, Prix du Livre Inter 1992) it forms the twins trilogy, translated into some forty languages and published in English as The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie. She also wrote the novel Hier (1995) and the autobiographical L'Analphabète (Zoé, 2004). She died in Neuchâtel in 2011.