The successful novelist Françoise Bourdin, one of the most read in France with more than 15 million books sold, died Sunday at the age of 70, the publishing group Editis announced on Monday.
“I extend my most sincere condolences to the family of Françoise Bourdin, to her two daughters, Fabienne and Frédérique, to her grandchildren; I am thinking of all the teams, from Belfond, from Plon and from Pocket, who have worked with her for so many years, as well as her millions of loyal readers”said the general manager of the Editis group, Michèle Benbunan.
Françoise Bourdin’s latest novel, Un si bel horizon, was released by Plon editions in early 2022. Ignored by the literary world, she has written nearly fifty books, which have met with immense success. Phenomenal sales in bookstores place it year after year among the ten biggest sellers of French books, alongside Marc Levy and Guillaume Musso.
“I would have liked to have been rewarded, it would have touched me, confided the author au Monde in 2019. They tell me that I sell so much that I don’t need any prizes or support from the press, but neither does Amélie Nothomb, in this case! » Françoise Bourdin then confessed to regret that there was a certain “contempt for popular literature”, which surprised him. “Pleasing the greatest number is what all authors want, right? Pleasing is not necessarily suspect. And most people don’t necessarily have bad taste.”launched the writer.
At the heart of his literary work: family sagas. She publishes her first novel, Wet Suns, in 1972, when she was not yet of age. A second novel Waves of yellow grassappeared the following year, and was adapted for television by Josée Dayan.
Up at dawn, the novelist, installed in a large Norman farmhouse in the Seine valley, not far from Giverny, stood immutably in front of her computer every morning to write. Extremely productive, she published a novel a year, or even two.