“Entering a country of shadows.”
We met French writer Neige Sinno, who, in her autobiographical novel Sad Tiger, tells the story of being abused as a child.
”I’m telling the story of my life. It’s a story I have to tell. I feel a necessity for this story to be told, for those things to enter the public space. But at the same time, I don’t want anybody to know about this.”
”The whole book is an exploration of paradoxes, or at least things that are paradoxical. Things that shouldn’t be put together, but they are. I’m trying to use language to understand better why those things are paradoxes or contradictions.”
A survivor of child sexual abuse at the hands of her own stepfather, Sinno had pressed charges against the perpetrator at the age of nineteen, leading to a public trial and conviction. In Sad Tiger, she reflects on these experiences in a very unconventional fashion. She coolly analyses the mind of a man who coerces a child into sex acts, and the taboos around incest, paedophilia, and sexual abuse. Her cerebral yet nonlinear contemplations about her childhood are lined with literary references, including to Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov.
In addition, Sinno asks how society copes with abuse that occurs in one of every ten families. Very often, she says, it is the victim that is being punished and abandoned for speaking out, not the perpetrator.
“I’m not going to find the right answer or closure about this because it’s also part of this wound. I’m never going to rest with these questions.”
Born in 1977 in the Hautes-Alpes region of France, and after having spent many years in Mexico as a writer, Neige Sinno today lives in the French Basque Country. Having completed her doctoral and postdoctoral studies in contemporary North American literature, she made her debut in 2007 with La vie des rats (The Life of Rats), a short story collection focusing on themes of youth and loneliness, and the 2018 novel, Le Camion (The Truck). Yet, her pièce de résistance is her 2023 work Triste Tigre (Sad Tiger), a recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Prix Femina 2023, the Le Monde Literary Prize 2023, the 2024 Strega European Prize, the Prix Goncourt des lycéens 2023, and the Choix Goncourt Prize India 2023. Sad Tiger (Seven Stories Press, 2025), translated by Natasha Lehrer, was shortlisted for the 2025 US National Book Award.
Neige Sinno was interviewed by Lotte Folke Kaarsholm during the Louisiana Literature Festival in August 2025.
Camera: Simon Weyhe
Edited by: Nanna Dahm
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
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