Lola Lafon – författare

A quietly powerful exploration of memory and forgetting, from one of France’s leading feminist public intellectuals“A labyrinth of looping, interlocked narratives which spiral out beyond the Annex as the night progresses. . . . The penultimate pages of this elegiac book are a sword-thrust to the heart.”—Laurel Berger, Irish Times In 2021, the award‑winning French writer Lola Lafon was granted permission to stay overnight—alone for ten hours—in the Annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family had hidden from the Nazis between 1942 and 1944. Lafon’s visit to this space, where Anne Frank wrote her famous diary, evoked the confinement and constant danger suffered by the Franks, and the family’s ghostly presence as well. “The night was inhabited, lit by reflections,” Lafon writes. “Some urgency still dwelled at the heart of the Annex, crouched there, ready to be discovered.” Exploring the many stories told about Anne Frank, Lafon tries to find the precocious girl at the heart of the venerated and exploited myth, a disciplined writer whose famous diary is in fact a wonderfully constructed literary work. Throughout, Lafon reflects on what it means to lose loved ones, both Lafon’s own family in the Holocaust and her childhood friend to the Khmer Rouge. A prizewinner and bestseller in France, this book asks us to consider the stories we tell ourselves about tragedy, how we grapple with loss, and why, in the face of danger and confinement, women write.

A quietly powerful exploration of memory and forgetting, from one of France’s leading feminist public intellectuals“A labyrinth of looping, interlocked narratives which spiral out beyond the Annex as the night progresses. . . . The penultimate pages of this elegiac book are a sword-thrust to the heart.”—Laurel Berger, Irish Times In 2021, the award‑winning French writer Lola Lafon was granted permission to stay overnight—alone for ten hours—in the Annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family had hidden from the Nazis between 1942 and 1944. Lafon’s visit to this space, where Anne Frank wrote her famous diary, evoked the confinement and constant danger suffered by the Franks, and the family’s ghostly presence as well. “The night was inhabited, lit by reflections,” Lafon writes. “Some urgency still dwelled at the heart of the Annex, crouched there, ready to be discovered.” Exploring the many stories told about Anne Frank, Lafon tries to find the precocious girl at the heart of the venerated and exploited myth, a disciplined writer whose famous diary is in fact a wonderfully constructed literary work. Throughout, Lafon reflects on what it means to lose loved ones, both Lafon’s own family in the Holocaust and her childhood friend to the Khmer Rouge. A prizewinner and bestseller in France, this book asks us to consider the stories we tell ourselves about tragedy, how we grapple with loss, and why, in the face of danger and confinement, women write.

The Montreal Olympics, 1976. A fourteen-year-old girl steps out onto the floor of the Montreal Forum and into history.Twenty seconds on the uneven bars is it all it takes for Nadia Comaneci, the slight, unsmiling child from Communist Romania, to etch herself into the collective memory. The judges award her an unprecedented perfect ten, the first in Olympic gymnastics. In The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, Lola Lafon weaves an intricate web of truth and fiction around Comaneci''s life, from her discovery by legendary gymnastics coach Béla Károlyi up to her defection to the United States in 1989. Adored by young girls in the West and appropriated as a political emblem by the Ceausescu regime, Comaneci was a fearless, fiercely determined child whose body would become a battleground in the Cold War story of East against West. Lafon''s novel is a powerful re-imagining of a childhood in the spotlight of history, politics and destiny.

An impassioned novel on the consequences of sexual exploitation and the dead ends of forgiveness13-year-old Cléo lives a drab existence with her parents in a suburb of Paris.Her life changes when she is offered the chance to obtain a scholarship – issued by a mysterious Foundation - to realise her dream and become a modern jazz dancer. But there is more to the Foundation and their suave representative than meets the eye. Soon Cléo finds a trap has closed in on her, and she’s fallen prey to a sinister system in which she’ll eventually become complicit. Over 30 years later, a cache of images surfaces on the internet and exposes the Foundation’s exploitative, hidden purposes. The police put out a call for witnesses, and Cléo, now with a successful career as a dancer behind her, comes to realise the past has come back to haunt her. As her sense of self diffracts into multiple, contrasting images, there’s no way out but to confront her double burden as victim and predator.

Una noche en la casa de Anne Frank para recuperar la verdadera voz de la adolescente más célebre de la historiaPremio Décembre 2022Premio Les Inrockuptibles 2022«El 18 de agosto de 2021 pasé la noche en el Museo Anne Frank, en el Anexo. Anne Frank, a quien la gente conoce aunque no sepa gran cosa de ella. ¿Cómo calificar su célebre diario, que todos los escolares han leído y que ningún adulto recuerda de verdad? ¿Es un testimonio, un testamento, una obra literaria? La de una muchacha que no va a poder más que subir y bajar unas escaleras, menos de cuarenta metros cuadrados por recorrer durante setecientos sesenta días.Esa noche me la figuraba semejante a un retiro, a un silencio. Imaginaba esa noche propicia para acoger la ausencia de Anne Frank. Me equivoqué. La noche está habitada, la iluminan reflejos; en el corazón del Anexo, se hallaba aún agazapada una urgencia con la que hay que dar.»

De la autora de La pequeña comunista que no sonreía nunca, una novela descarnada y emotiva sobre el abuso, el maltrato, la traición y la vergüenzaFinalista del Premio Goncourt 2020Premio Landerneau des LecteursPremio de Novela de los estudiantes France Culture - Télérama1984. A Cléo, de trece años, que lleva con sus padres una existencia modesta en el extrarradio parisino, le proponen un buen día una beca, que concede una misteriosa Fundación, para conseguir su sueño: llegar a ser bailarina de modern jazz. Pero en lo que cae es en una trampa, un comercio sexual, en la que queda atrapada y a la que lleva a otras colegialas.2019. Aparece en Internet un fichero de fotos, la policía busca testigos entre las que fueron víctimas de la Fundación. Bailarina profesional ya, Cléo se percata de que un pasado que no acaba de pasar ha vuelto a buscarla y de que ya es hora de plantarle cara a su doble carga de víctima y de culpable.Zozobrar va recorriendo las diversas etapas del destino de Cléo a través de la mirada de quienes la conocieron, mientras su personaje se difracta y se recompone sin parar, a imagen y semejanza de nuestras identidades mutantes y de los misterios que las rigen.Lola Lafon, al pasar revista a los abusos desde el enfoque de la fractura social y racial, brinda aquí una candente reflexión acerca de los callejones sin salida del perdón al tiempo que rinde homenaje al mundo de los espectáculos populares de variedades, donde las sonrisas se contratan y las pestañas postizas son de rigor: erotismo y sufrimiento del cuerpo, magia del escenario y de los bastidores del dolor.