Nathacha Appanah wins the Prix Femina
Studying in France can take you very far... As far as Mauritian journalist and novelist Nathacha Appanah, who has just won the Prix Femina 2025, one of the most important literary awards, for her novel La Nuit au cœur. Born in Mauritius, Nathacha Appanah came to France in 1998 to train as a journalist, and it was in France that she pursued her career. She is the author of a dozen novels.
Created in 1904, the Prix Femina is awarded each year by an all-female jury, in early November, for a work in the French language.
From the India of ancestors to France
Nathacha Appanah is the first writer of Mauritian origin to win the Prix Femina. Born in 1973 in Mahébourg, a coastal village in the south-east of Mauritius, Nathacha Apannah comes from a family of so-called "engagés indiens". Arrived on the island's farms at the end of the 19th century, the "engagés indiens", although free in a strictly legal sense, were in reality subjected to living conditions akin to slavery.
At the age of 17, Nathacha Appanah, the daughter of an engineer and a schoolteacher, tried her hand at literature by winning a competition for a local newspaper. She pursued a first career in journalism on the island, before moving to France in 1998 to study journalism in Grenoble and then Lyon. She then moved to France to work in the print media and in free-lance radio.
In 2003, she published her first novel, Les Rochers de Poudre d'Or, which recounts the epic story of Indian indentured laborers. Other works followed, such as Tropique de la violence, a novel based on the experience of a stay in Mayotte, published in 2016, which won the very first Prix Femina des lycéens. In 2023, she also published a more personal account, La Mémoire délavée, in which she evokes both her childhood memories and the memory of her ancestors, from her forebears to her own history.
A powerful, feminist work
Nathacha Appanah's literary output - 13 novels and stories in all - has led her biographers to describe her work as "powerful and feminist, rooted in the cosmopolitan reality of the Indian Ocean and marked by the economic and social contradictions of its creolized societies".
For Le Monde, the daily of reference, with Nathacha Appanah, the Prix Femina crowns "a work inhabited by the question of origins, violence and confinement".
La Nuit au cœur, published by Gallimard, is a deeply moving investigation of domestic violence. The novel "interweaves three stories of women who are victims of their partner's violence"." On the edge, between strength and humility", writes her publisher, Nathacha Appanah "scrutinizes the unbearable enigma of conjugal feminicide, when the dark night takes the place of love". According to Radio France, Nathacha Appanah draws on her own experience to "plunge the reader, page after page, into the marital hold". The narrative turns into a meticulous investigation, as there is "an obsession to know the precise sequence of events, to collect every detail, in the manner of a fait-diversière". Radio France Culture points out that "Nathacha Appanah has, as a reminder, worked as a journalist".
Journalism, writing and teaching
However, Nathacha Appanah's career is not limited to journalism and writing, or even translation (she has translated several English-language works). In 2022-2023, the writer will become the eighth holder of the Chair of Writer in Residence at Sciences Po, where she will succeed the likes of Kamel Daoud, Marie Darrieussecq, Patrick Chamoiseau and Maylis de Kerangal.
"A novel initiative in the French university landscape", according to Sciences Po, the Writer-in-Residence Chair was created in 2019 to strengthen "students' creative expression and enable them to develop critical and original thinking". The two writing workshops led by Nathacha Appanah thus focused on two key themes in her career: " The shape of a story " and " Writing detail and periphery, the particular and the universal ". Another way to question the importance of imagination, and the relationship between reality and fiction...
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