Mathias Énard was born in 1972 in Niort, France. After completing his studies in Arabic and Persian language and culture at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) in Paris, he lived in Beirut, Tunis, Venice, Rome, and Berlin, working mainly as a translator. Since 2000, he has been based in Barcelona, where he teaches Arabic at the university. His narrative debut came in 2003 with La perfezione del tiro (La perfection du tir), and his reputation was consolidated after the release of Zona (Zone, 2008), a modernist-tinged novel presented as a night-long stream of consciousness, in which the memories of a spy intertwine with the shadow zones of official History. Attracted by the Mediterranean and its cosmopolitanism, in the subsequent Parlami di battaglie, di re e di elefanti (Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants, 2010), Énard drew inspiration from an imaginary stay in Constantinople by Michelangelo Buonarroti to recount an (impossible) encounter between East and West. Journey as a metaphor for existence and a present day full of unknowns returns to assert itself also in Rue des voleurs (2012), a work that narrates the emigration to Spain of the young Moroccan Lakhdar, as well as in the dreamlike itinerary between Europe and the Middle East at the center of Bussola (Boussole), the novel that won the Prix Goncourt 2015. To this production were added in the following years Il banchetto annuale della confraternita dei becchini (2021), set in the French countryside, and Disertare (2025), split into two parallel stories on the themes of war, escape, and the human cost of conflicts, a finalist for the International Booker Prize. In 2026, he inaugurated a compelling novelistic tetralogy on the concept of borders in our day, starting with the volume Malinconia dei confini – Nord. He is a radio host for the broadcaster France Culture

(photo: © Giliola Chistè)