Laurent Binet

Laurent Binet is a writer-journalist  known best for his novel, HHhH (2009), a historical thriller in the extensive field of World War II fiction. Binet takes up the event of “Operation Änthropoide” in a first-person narrative probing how we investigate, reconstruct, and imagine conflicts such as all-out war and the Shoah. It won the Prix Goncourt pour le premier roman in 2010. Its English translation received considerable critical attention in international circuits, and among American writers, historians, and critics.

Binet’s agreed to narrate the last Socialist presidential campaign of François Hollande as an embedded reporter : Rien ne se passe comme prévu (2012). The disappointment in this government that followed led him to write an invective in July 2014 in the magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur. The exchange with Minister Michel Sapin marks a telling incident in French political journalism today.

Binet is currently completing his second narrative that takes him in the direction of intellectual history, revolving around the talismanic figure who died abruptly: Roland Barthes.