French novelist Linda Lê dies at 58
The French novelist of Vietnamese origin Linda Lê died on Monday at the age of 58, announced her publisher Stock. She succumbed to a long illness, said her publishing house. “Her writing was the result of so many sedimented readings, her books like so many marks of what literature had deposited in her. His illness which affected him did not change his will to write”, paid tribute to him Manuel Carcassone, director of Stock editions.
“Sadness and shock to lose Linda Lê, writer and critic (…) Her articles show a great reader, dialoguing with the texts as with living beings”, wrote on Twitter Pierre Benetti, co-founder of the literary journal En attendant Nadeau, at which she collaborated.
“Immense sadness to learn of the death this morning of Linda Lê, author of one of the major works of contemporary literature and very great reader”, said Sylvain Bourmeau, director of the magazine AOC, where she also published texts .
His work rewarded with the Prince of Monaco Prize
The novelist had published in February “From no one I was the contemporary”, at Stock. His novel narrated the meeting in Moscow in 1923 between the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam and the Vietnamese independence activist Ho Chi Minh.
Linda Lê was born in 1963 in Dalat, Vietnam. In 1969, his family had left Saigon to flee the war. At the French high school, she fell in love with Victor Hugo and Balzac. In 1977, two years after the end of the war, she left Vietnam for France. She was 23 years old when her first novel, “Un Si Tender Vampire” (1986), was published, but it was with “The Gospels of Crime” (1992) that she felt born into literature.
In 2019, she received the Prince of Monaco prize for all of her work.