Gilles Leroy

Gilles Leroy is a French novelist born in 1958 in Bagneux, a town in the Hauts-de-Seine department near Paris. He writes in French, and his name is most closely associated with the 2007 Prix Goncourt, which he won for Alabama song. He belongs to contemporary French fiction, and his career has earned him several literary prizes.

He earned a licence in Arts and Letters in 1977 and a master's degree in Modern Literature in 1979. Before devoting himself fully to writing, he travelled in the United States and Japan and worked as a journalist. The novel is his main form, and within it he favours biographical and intimate subjects, focusing on the inner lives of real people and the relationships that shape them. His novels began in the late 1980s with Habibi (1987) and Maman est morte (1990), and he kept up a steady output afterwards, with titles such as Les Jardins publics (1994), Les Maîtres du monde (1996) and L'Amant russe (2002).

He received the Prix Nanterre de la nouvelle in 1992 for Les Derniers seront les premiers, and the Prix Valery Larbaud in 1999 for Machines à sous. In 2004 Grandir brought him the Prix Millepages and the Prix Cabourg, and in 2005 he was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. His most widely noticed book is Alabama song, an imagined first-person monologue spoken by Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel gave a voice to a woman best known as the partner of a famous author.

His legacy lies largely in that approach: returning to historical figures through their private experience rather than through the eyes of those around them. Alongside his fiction he has also written for the stage, with plays such as Le jour des fleurs and Ange Soleil.