Marguerite Duras

Born in 1914 in French Indochina, Marguerite Duras was one of France’s most important twentieth-century literary figures. She wrote the screenplay for the French film Hiroshima mon amour, directed by Alain Resnais, and her novel The Lover won the Prix Goncourt in 1984 and was also made into a widely acclaimed film. Upon her death in Paris in 1996, Alain Juppe, then prime minister of France, mourned her as “a great writer whose magnificent and disturbing style, the symbol of the nouveau roman, turned contemporary world literature upside down.”