Amélie Nothomb

Amélie Nothomb is a Belgian novelist writing in French, born in 1966 in Etterbeek. The daughter of a diplomat, she spent her childhood in Japan, China, the United States and Bangladesh before settling in Belgium at seventeen. Her first novel, Hygiène de l'assassin (Hygiene and the Assassin), appeared with Albin Michel in 1992, and she has published a novel there every autumn since. Fear and Trembling (1999), drawn from a year in a Japanese company, won the Grand Prix du roman of the Académie française; Tokyo Fiancée (Ni d'Ève ni d'Adam, 2007) won the Prix de Flore, and Premier sang (2021), about her father, the Prix Renaudot. She has been a member of Belgium's Royal Academy of French Language and Literature since 2015.