Anne Serre

Anne Serre is a French novelist and short story writer born in Bordeaux in 1960, known for surreal, fabulist fiction that interrogates the nature of narration. Winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle.

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About Anne Serre

Anne Serre was born in Bordeaux in 1960. Her debut novel, Les Gouvernantes, appeared in 1992, after which she worked for several years as a book editor for a women's magazine under a pseudonym. She has since published more than a dozen novels and story collections in French.

Her fiction is fabulist and anti-realist, drawing on fairy-tale logic, psychoanalysis, and a restless play with narrative form. In an interview she described her long-standing fascination with the question of who is speaking in a novel, and her books constantly blur the line between narrator, character, and author. The language is tight, sensual, and often surreal, with a dream quality that reviewers have likened to an encounter between Charles Perrault, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter.

Serre won the 2008 Cino del Duca Foundation award and the 2020 Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle for her story collection Au cœur d'un été tout en or. In 2025, her 2008 novel Un chapeau léopard, translated by Mark Hutchinson as A Leopard-Skin Hat, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Hutchinson has translated four of her works into English: The Governesses, The Fool and Other Moral Tales, The Beginners, and A Leopard-Skin Hat.

For a first read, A Leopard-Skin Hat is the most accessible entry point. It is a slim, intensely personal novel about a lifelong friendship with a complicated, psychologically troubled friend named Fanny, and it captures the full range of Serre's gifts: the playful interrogation of form, the emotional precision, and the strange, luminous language that sets her work apart.

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A Leopard-Skin Hat

A Leopard-Skin Hat is a slim, deeply felt novel by French writer Anne Serre, translated from the 2008 original by Mark Hutchinson. It traces the lifelong friendship between an unnamed Narrator and his childhood friend Fanny, a woman whose profound psychological struggles make her at once the most vivid and most elusive person in his life. Structured as a series of fragmentary scenes spanning decades, the book is as much about the impossibility of fully knowing another person as it is about that person. Written in the aftermath of Serre's own sister's death, the novel becomes a meditation on grief, memory, and the stories we construct to hold the people we lose. Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, it stands as a distinctive piece of literary fiction that questions the very conventions of the novel while remaining genuinely moving.

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