The French novelist of Vietnamese origin Linda Lê died Monday at the age of 58, we learned from her publisher, Stock. She succumbed to a long illness, said the publishing house.
“Sadness and shock to lose Linda Lê, writer and critic. […] Her articles show a great reader, interacting with the texts as with living beings,” wrote on Twitter Pierre Benetti, co-founder of the literary review Waiting for Nadeauin 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 for his part Sylvain Bourmeau, editor of the journal AOCwhere she also published texts.
Linda Lê had published in February Of no one I was the contemporaryaccount of 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 moved to 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 when her first novel came out, Such a tender vampire (1986), but it is with The Crime Gospels (1992) that she feels born into literature, she said.
In 2019, she received the Prince-Pierre-de-Monaco prize for all of her work.