Amélie Nothomb

Tara Collington (University of Waterloo)

Ed. by David Houston Jones, University of Exeter
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.07: French Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (University of Western Australia), Hugo Azerad (University of Cambridge), Patrick ffrench (King's College London), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck, University of London), Siobhán McIlvanney (King's College London), Sinan Richards (King's College London), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Dates

Born 13 Aug 1967
Activity 1992-ongoing

Places

Born in Japan
Active in Belgium

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Nothomb's Works

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Amélie Nothomb, a Belgian Francophone writer who divides her time between Paris and Brussels, was born on August 13, 1967 in Japan, where she spent her formative years while her father was stationed there as a diplomat. In 1972, Patrick Nothomb was transferred to Beijing, where the family spent three years. The next ten years were punctuated by a series of moves that saw the family relocate numerous times (to New York City, to Bangladesh, to Burma and to Laos) for various diplomatic postings. Amélie Nothomb finally moved to Belgium at the age of seventeen to attend the Université libre de Bruxelles where she completed a degree in philology.

Nothomb’s work may be divided into two major categories: first, predominantly autobiographical texts recounting her childhood in Japan, various

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2156 words

Citation: Collington, Tara. "Amélie Nothomb". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 January 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12583, accessed 22 November 2024.]