Marguerite Duras

Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu in French Indochina, where her father died when she was small and her mother sank the family's savings into a rice-farming concession that flooded uselessly year after year: the wound she returned to for the rest of her career. She left for France at eighteen to study, then joined the Resistance during the Occupation; her first husband was deported to Buchenwald and survived only barely.

She wrote the screenplay for Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and dozens of novels and plays across four decades, wrestling for much of that time with alcoholism, before The Lover (1984), her most direct return to colonial Indochina and a teenage affair, won the Prix Goncourt and made her, at seventy, an international bestseller. She died in Paris in 1996.