Lydie Salvayre

Lydie Salvayre, writer and playwright, born in 1946. Her parents, Andalusian father and Catalan mother, were refugees in France in 1939. She grew up near Toulouse and received a degree in Modern Languages and in Medicine. She specialized in psychiatry in Marseilles, where she worked for a long time in a clinic, before she moved to Paris in 1983. There she worked as a child psychiatrist. She began to write in many magazines at the end of the 1970s, and since then she has written twenty books, translated to twenty languages. She has received the following awards: Hermès Prize for her first novel La Déclaration (1990), Novembre Prize with La Compagnie des spectres (1997), and the François-Billetdoux with BW (2009). Some of her books have been adapted to the theatre and have been set to music as well. She won the Goncourt Prize in 2014, one of the highest awards of the french literature, with her book Pas pleurer, about the Spanish Civil War.