Marie Charrel

Marie Charrel is a French novelist and journalist. Her fiction follows individual lives through the fractures of history, weaving together memory, transmission and freedom. It has been awarded for its narrative power and for its ability to question the past.

News

• 2026Nous sommes faits d'orage (Les Léonides, 2025) is published in Italy as La figlia del fuoco by Marsilio Editori, the first translation of Marie Charrel's work.
• 2026The novel wins the Prix des librairies Payot in Switzerland, the Prix Libr'à Nous in France and the Prix des Grands Espaces. It is also a finalist for the Prix Franz Hessel, a Franco-German prize for European literature, and selected for the Prix des Librairies indépendantes belges.
• 2026Radicales. Pourquoi l'extrême droite séduit les femmes ?, an essay on women's support for far-right parties in Europe, is published by Les Léonides.

Full bibliography by country, with publishers and prizes →

Biography

Novelist

Marie Charrel published her first novel, Une fois ne compte pas, to critical acclaim in 2010. L'Enfant tombée des rêves and Les Enfants indociles followed, confirming her interest in singular destinies and family bonds.

From 2017 she turned to a broader body of work rooted in overlooked or repressed episodes of the twentieth century. Her heroines — free women, resisters, forgotten figures — move through historical fractures that still resonate today. Je suis ici pour vaincre la nuit. Yo Laur (1879–1944) retraces the life of the painter and resister Yo Laur, the author's great-great-aunt, deported to Ravensbrück. Une nuit avec Jean Seberg conjures the American actress crushed by McCarthyism. Les Danseurs de l'aube brings back to life a brother and sister, flamenco dancers of the 1930s, torn apart by Nazism. La Fille de Lake Placid appeared in the collection « Les Audacieuses », which fictionalises the paths of inspiring women.

Les Mangeurs de nuit, a nature-writing novel steeped in Indigenous myths and set in the rainforests of British Columbia, won five literary prizes in 2023 and brought her work to a wider readership. Nous sommes faits d'orage, set in the Albanian mountains, follows a family memory buried under decades of communist dictatorship. It has received several prizes and, in 2026, became her first book to be translated.

She is also the author of two essays: Qui a peur des vieilles ?, on the invisibility of women over fifty in Western societies, and Radicales, an investigation into women's support for far-right parties in France and other European democracies.

Journalist

A graduate of the Institut d'études politiques de Grenoble and of the Institut pratique du journalisme (IPJ), Marie Charrel won the Prisma academy award in 2006, which opened the doors of the newsroom of Capital. The same year she received the Prix Bayard des jeunes journalistes and the Prix AJIS de l'information sociale.

She joined Le Monde in 2013, where she covers international monetary policy and the European economy. In 2015 she received the Prix du meilleur article financier in the young journalists category. Her articles have been published in translation in the United Kingdom by The Guardian, in Italy by Internazionale and in the Netherlands by 360 Magazine.

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