Author on Tour: Neige Sinno

Neige Sinno is a French writer who has studied American literature in the United States and Mexico and worked as a translator and literature professor. She is the author of two previous books, Le Camion (Christophe Luquin) and La Vie des rats (La Tangente). Born in France, she has lived in Mexico for the past 20 years. Her 2023 book, Triste tigre (P.O.L.), won several of France’s top literary prizes and became the publishing sensation of the year. It will be published in English as Sad Tiger by Seven Stories and translated by Natasha Lehrer.

About Sad Tiger

(trans. by Natasha Lehrer, Seven Stories Press, 2025)

Winner of many prestigious awards (including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the European Strega Prize, and the Goncourt Prizes in the US, the UK, Belgium, Slovakia, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and South Korea), Sad Tiger is based on a series of devastating events: From the age of seven until 14 or 16, Neige Sinno was sexually abused by her stepfather. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather, after which Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes, among others.

Sad Tiger—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”—is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book, there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? Amid so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

Sad Tiger will be released in the United States in April 2025. This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from the Albertine Translation Fund.

For more information, click here.

Schedule

Neige Sinno will be on tour in the US in April 2025.

Her tour schedule will include :

• Thursday, April 4: Event @ Yale University (New Haven, CT) – event in English
• Friday, April 4: A Conversation with Natasha Lehrer and Nina MacLaughlin @ Brookline Booksmith (Brookline, MA) – event in English
• Monday, April 7: Event @ Duke University (Durham, NC) – event in English
• Tuesday, April 8: Event @ Albertine (New York, NY) – event in English. RSVP here.

For more information, please email Valentine Richet at valentine.richet@villa-albertine.org.