About

Anne-Gaëlle Huon

“I write Christmas truces.”

At Christmas 1914, on the front line, enemy soldiers laid down their weapons for one night. They climbed out of the trenches to sing together and exchange cigarettes. The next day, the war resumed. But that night happened, and no one can take it away from them.

Life, with its grief, its secrets, its loneliness and its silent violence, is sometimes a battlefield. My novels are those truces. They do not deny how hard the world can be, they refuse to let it have the last word.

They look for what lifts us up and what heals, the bonds we choose, mutual help, poetry, the tenderness that endures. Everything begins with what I call an “anomaly”, one of those flashes of humanity that burst out where we no longer expect them.

I am the first reader of what I write. This puppet theatre whose strings I pull, I build it first for myself, to convince myself, page after page, that the world is still a place where one can live. It is how I stay on my feet.

I was born in Toulon, France, in 1984. My paternal grandmother, Jeannine, meant a great deal to me as a child. She has never left my books and returns, under other names, in each of them.

I wrote my first novel in New York, beneath the stained-glass windows of a former chapel turned library. Since then, my books have won several readers' prizes and have been translated into eight languages.

Trained at La Fémis, the French national film school, I also write for film and television. I live in Shanghai, where I run creative writing workshops. My next novel will be published in France in spring 2027.