Anne Berest

Origins and early life

Anne Berest was born in Paris on 15 September 1979 to the linguist Lélia Picabia and the engineer Pierre Berest; her sister is the writer Claire Berest, and through her father's line she is a great-granddaughter of the painter Francis Picabia and of Gabriële Buffet-Picabia.

Work and career

Her Jewish descent runs through her mother: her great-grandparents Ephraïm and Emma Rabinovitch, who had come from Russia by way of Latvia and Palestine, and two of their children, Noémie and Jacques, were deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1942; only her grandmother Myriam escaped. In 2003 an anonymous postcard arrived at her mother's house, a photograph of the Opéra Garnier on one side and, on the other, those four names and nothing else.

La Carte postale, published in 2021, is the account of the four-year investigation she and her mother conducted into who had sent it and into the family it named, a book that is at once a detective story, a family history and an examination of what it is to be Jewish in France when almost nothing has been handed down. It won the Prix Renaudot des lycéens in 2021 and the Choix Goncourt of the United States, has been translated into some forty languages, and Time named the English edition among the year's must-read books in 2023.

She also writes for the screen and the stage, including the series Mytho and the screenplay of Audrey Diwan's L'Événement.