Anne Serre


Anne Serre is the author of fifteen books, as well as numerous short stories and essays, and the recipient of a 2008 Cino del Duca Foundation award. Her first novel Les Gouvernantes was praised in La Croix for ‘its remarkable economy of style and in Libération as ‘a delightful Sabbath’. From its publication in 1992, till 2000, she worked under a pseudonym as book editor of a leading magazine for women. Serre won the 2020 Goncourt de la nouvelle for her short story collection Au coeur d'un été tout en or (All in the Golden Afternoon). The Beginners (2021) is Serre’s third book to be translated into the English.

The Governesses and The Fool and Other Moral Tales were translated by Mark Hutchinson.

Related articles and media:
‘The Unnameable inspires me’, Anne Serre interviewed by Mary South for BOMB.
An interview with Anne Serre, Minor Literature[s].


‘Anne Serre’s style is perfectly controlled. Colorful, by turns elegant and violent, it provokes that enchantment borne out of an unbridled imagination.’— Marie Claire

‘Serre’s language is tight and fabulist, a slim and sensuous fairy tale that reads like something born from an orgy between Charles Perrault, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter.’— Full Stop

© Francesca Mantovani