Founded in 2014 by French translator Cécile Lee, Les Fugitives began as an informal collective of benevolent contributors, including Angeline Rothermundt for editorial, Laura Carlin and Anaïs Mims for illustrations, Charles Boyle for typesetting, Dominic Lee for design and photography, and, for the many tasks involved in taking the project off the ground and keeping it going over the years, Clem Clement, Laetitia Desbrière Batista, Feya Dervitsiotis, Ellen Dunsdon, Dominic Jaeckle, Jack Morson, Jennifer Obidike, Rosa Picard, Daniella Shreir, Jessica Spivey, and Leyla Yilmaz, among many others whose input was more fleeting. Our colophon was designed by artist Ben Branagan for BB-Studio. In 2021, Sarah Schulte became the lead designer and illustrator, with a new, flexible system typography inaugurated in 2022. Les Fugitives is run by its founder, currently assisted by Clem Clement, Jack Morson, and Laetitia Desbrière-Batista. We gratefully acknowledges financial support, for many of our publications, from Arts Council England, the French Institute, the Centre National du Livre, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Read on for our contact emails and to find out more about our list, as well as reviews and interviews.
Editorial & Production:
Cécile Lee
cecile@lesfugitives.com
Press & publicity / Events:
Jack Morson
publicist@lesfugitives.com
Social media:
Laetitia Desbrière Batista
lesfugitivesmedia@gmail.com
Editorial assistant:
Clem Clement
clem@lesfugitives.com
Trade sales:
Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd
orders@turnaround-uk.com
Board of Advisors:
Pete Ayrton
Paul Fulcher
Naima Rashid
Angeline Rothermundt
Jessica Spivey
More about our list:
When Les Fugitives was founded in 2014, with our first publication appearing in 2015, the award-winning Suite for Barbara Loden, by Nathalie Léger, translated from French by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon, our focus was Francophone women’s writing only. However, we soon began to break our own rules. While Now, Now, Louison, published in 2018, is a deeply feminist work, originally written in French, which takes Louise Bourgeois’ life and art as its subject and is written by one of her close friends, Jean Frémon simply is not a woman. Later, English originals crept in. In 2021, we couldn’t resist Lauren Elkin’s No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute, with its idiosyncratic commuter’s-eye view of the French capital. The seed sown by No. 91/92 soon sprouted into the quick brown fox collection, which curates English-language originals by contemporary writers of all genders. Our focus remains on women in arts and society, underrepresented experiences, marginal voices and unconventional literary forms, but it is expanded.
In 2025, we look back on ten years of Les Fugitives with pride in our achievements. We still work with French-to-English translators with a wide range of experience from award-winning to emerging, and we endeavour to publish ambitious yet accessible literary fiction and narrative non-fiction by living authors. Critically acclaimed feminist women writers working in French remain close to our hearts and form the backbone of our catalogue. Now they are joined, complemented and contrasted by English and American writers, and other French voices in translation, notably art curator Yann Chateigné Tytelman (Blackout, 2025). Our co-publishing project, launched in December 2023, allowed us to keep going and expand our remit without compromising the quality of our publications. We can’t wait to see where we’ll go next.
Reviews & interviews:
‘Since its first book in 2015, [Les Fugitives] has become a leading voice among publishers of literature in translation in the UK.’
- Robert Greer, The Idler, March 2021
‘Independent Publishers: Coming Out of a Crisis’, The Verdict with Paul Burke, a piece on COVID-19, ‘Super Thursday’, and the impact on indie publishers.
- NB Magazine, 12 September 2020
‘Led by editor Cécile Menon, publisher Les Fugitives has one clear aim — to disperse “short, new writing by award-winning francophone female authors previously unavailable in English or in the UK.” In this instance, we are gifted with Mark Hutchinson’s excellent translation of Anne Serre’s 1992 novel Les Gouvernantes. While many translations can often seem fragmented, losing the essence of the original prose, the great success of Les Fugitives has been to capture the crispness, spontaneity and immediacy of the source material. Here, as with last year’s Now, Now Louison, Hutchinson’s translation of Anne Serre’s delicious French fable feels effortlessly satisfying.’
- Briony Willis, The London Magazine, May 2019
‘In the short time of its existence, Les Fugitives has established itself as a curious new voice in the collective world of independent publishing. A collective of translators and editors founded and directed by Cécile Menon…’
- Tank Magazine, June 2018
‘Les Fugitives (...) publishes only short books that have been written by award-winning, female, francophone writers who have previously not been translated into English. If that sounds incredibly niche, it isn’t. (And if you do think it’s niche, think of the long French literary tradition of imposing rules on fiction, like the Perec-centred Oulipo movement.) Think of how many books are published, think of how many literary awards are given, think of how many writers are women and think of how many places in the world people speak French. With these rules, they obviously have a limited pool of books to choose from, but still a large one. (...)if Blue Self-Portrait is anything to go by, then Les Fugitives is clearly doing the English world of letters a great service, because this is a belter.’
- Scott Manley Hadley, Triumph of the Now, June 2017
‘Criminal Aesthetics’, an interview with Les Fugitives, on Suite for Barbara Loden and Eve out of Her Ruins.
- HOTEL, issue 1, 22 June 2016
‘Earlier this year, with little fanfare, a mysterious new publishing collective of editors, translators and designers called Les Fugitives published an extraordinary novel.’
- Bidisha, BBC Arts, 21 October 2015