Marguerite Duras

(1914 - 1996)

Born and raised in French Indochina, Marguerite Duras moved to France at the age of seventeen to study at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. During World War II, both her husband and sister-in-law were sent to a concentration camp, and she became active in the French Resistance in 1943, publishing her first novel, The Impudent Ones, that same year. A champion of the left, Duras was later a supporter and documentarian of the student uprisings in Paris in 1968. In her novels, plays, and films, Duras explored, as has been noted, the “interplay of love and destruction.” She received the Prix Goncourt for The Lover in 1984.