Biography

Apparently, nothing predisposed Florence Noiville to writing. After HEC (promotion 1984), Sciences-Po and Master of Private Law, she joined an American multinational as a financial analyst.

Soon ratios and operating accounts bore her. She who has always been interested in literature proposes her services to Le Monde des livres and begins a parallel life: daytime she is in finance, nighttime a freelance for Le Monde. In 1987, she takes the risk of stopping everything to devote herself entirely to writing. She starts from scratch, first as an editor for youth at Bayard Presse (1987-1994) and in Le Monde where she enters as an employee in 1994. She is now Deputy Chief of the Le Monde des Livres after being a literary journalist and head of a section specializing in foreign literature. Secretly, she dreams of writing a novel without daring to really get started. She begins with children's books, and in 2003 signs a biography of the Nobel Prize Isaac Bashevis Singer (Stock, 2004 prize of biographical accounts, resulting in the U.S.A Farrar Straus and Giroux).

"For her first novel, Florence Noiville has a thorough understanding of her sensitivity, while delicate and clairobscur. Difficult to say the confusion of a chronically depressed mother stranded with the insane, and placed there by a decision of unspeakable brutality. Not a word to much in this tight story. The children are right: it is lighter in the dark when someone is talking." (Pierre Assouline, Nouvel Observateur, Thursday, September 20, 2007)