Marguerite Duras (1914–1996)

Marguerite Duras was the pen name of Marguerite Donnadieu, born in Gia Dinh, French Indochina (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) to Marie and Henri Donnadieu, teachers from France. In 1933, she went to France for her higher education. After completing studies at the Sorbonne in political science and law, she became a member of the French Communist Party (she would later be expelled). In the late 1930s, she worked for the French Ministry of the Colonies. During World War II, she worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper quotas to publishers, a de facto book-censorship system, but also was a member of the French Resistance. In 1942, for the publication of her first novel, she chose Duras as her pen name for a village where her late father's house was located. Her career as an avant-garde writer took off in the 1950s with works such as Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall, 1950).

She was a prolific writer of plays, novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays, with many of her works marked by feelings of alienation. She returned often to the theme of love between people of different races. Her semi-autobiographical novel L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), about her youth in Indochina, won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize.