Mathias Enard – författare

Fleeing a nameless war, a soldier emerges from the Mediterranean scrubland, filthy, exhausted and seeking refuge. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship near Berlin, a scientific conference pays tribute to the late Paul Heudeber, an East German mathematician, Buchenwald survivor, communist and anti-fascist whose commitment to his side of the Wall was unshaken by its collapse. The oblique pull between these two narratives – a cipher in itself – brings to light everything that is at stake in times of conflict: truth and deception, loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair. Superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell and told in Mathias Enard’s typically mesmerizing, inventive prose, The Deserters lays bare the ravages of war on the most intimate aspects of life – and asks what remains of our selves in its wreckage.

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. An immersive, nocturnal, musical novel, full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour, Compass is a journey and a declaration of admiration, a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out – like a bridge between West and East, yesterday and tomorrow. Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, this is Mathias Enard’s most ambitious novel since Zone.

Francis Mirkovic, a French Intelligence Services agent for fifteen years, is travelling first class on the train from Milan to Rome. Handcuffed to the luggage rack above him is a briefcase containing a wealth of information about the war criminals, terrorists and arms dealers of the Zone – the Mediterranean region, from Barcelona to Beirut, from Algiers to Trieste, which has become his speciality – to sell to the Vatican. Exhausted by alcohol and amphetamines, he revisits the violent history of the Zone and his own participation in that violence, beginning as a mercenary fighting for a far-right Croatian militia in the 1990s. One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard’s Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond

Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary AwardAs night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the center of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East.With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources—nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie—and binds them together in a most magical way.

In an unnamed city completely torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, controls his breath, stays serenely calm, and listens to his body and the beat of his heart. Lying in wait on rooftops, he shoots at civilians while his mentally ill mother cowers in their apartment. But the violence eats away at any sense of morality as he kills indiscriminately, for the sake of killing itself. His routine is eventually disrupted by the arrival of Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for his mother, and his increasingly disturbing obsession with Myrna threatens to push them all over the brink. This unrelenting book, whose harrowing urgency belies its piercing lyricism, exposes the disastrous effects of extreme violence on society.

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2026SHORTLISTED FOR THE FRENCH-AMERICAN FOUNDATION TRANSLATION PRIZE 2025A filthy and exhausted soldier emerges from the Mediterranean wilderness—he is escaping from an unspecified war, trying to flee incessant violence and find refuge in solitude. Meanwhile, on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference takes place to pay tribute to renowned East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist and anti-fascist, and a survivor of the camps at Buchenwald.The tension grows between these two narrative threads, and—pulled together in Mathias Énard’s enchanting, brilliant, erudite prose—time itself seems to become tightly interwoven, drawn together by the immense stakes of love and politics, loyalty and belief, hope and survival.

In Tangier, young Lakhdar finds himself homeless after being caught in flagrante with his cousin Meryem. As the political and religious tensions in the Mediterranean flare up with the Arab Spring and the global financial crisis, Lakhdar and his friend Bassam entertain dreams of emigration, fuelled by a desire for freedom and a better life. Part political thriller, part road-movie, part romance, the latest novel by Mathias Enard takes us from the violence of Tangier's streets to Barcelona's louche Raval quarter. Street of Thieves is an intense coming-of-age story that delves deep into the brutal realities of the immigrant experience.

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language. Brimming with Mathias Enard’s characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess – and a paradoxically macabre paean to life’s richness.

In a nameless city torn apart by civil war, a teenage sniper has only one goal: to fire the perfect shot. He sublimates himself into his weapon, learns to maintain impassivity, controls his breath, listens to his body and the beat of his heart. Lying in wait on rooftops, he takes aim at people below while his traumatized mother cowers in their flat. But the violence eats away at any sense of morality as he kills civilians and combatants indiscriminately, for the sake of killing itself. His routine is disrupted by the arrival of Myrna, a fifteen-year-old girl hired to care for his mother, and his increasingly disturbing obsession with her soon threatens to push them all into the abyss. Now appearing in English more than twenty years after its original publication, Mathias Enard’s debut novel is a timeless study of how extreme violence corrodes the soul, tracking the convulsions of a brutalized mind in spare, unflinching prose.

In 1506, Michelangelo – a young but already renowned sculptor – is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci's design was rejected: 'You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.' Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II – whose commission he leaves unfinished – and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork. Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants – constructed from real historical fragments – is a thrilling page-turner about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.