Marguerite Duras was a French author, screenwriter and filmmaker known for her experimental literary style and cinematic writing. She is best known for her autobiographical novel L'Amant (1984), which won the Prix Goncourt. Her screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour (1959) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Marguerite Duras was born Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu on 4 April 1914 in Gia Định, French Indochina. Her parents were French teachers who had moved to Southeast Asia. After her father died in 1921, the family faced financial hardship. This experience shaped her early writing, particularly in Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950), based on her mother's failed land investment.
In 1931, Duras moved to France and passed the first part of her baccalaureate with Vietnamese as a foreign language. She returned briefly to Saigon to finish her schooling, then settled in Paris in 1933. Marguerite graduated in public law in 1936 and later obtained a diploma in political economy. From 1937, she worked for the Ministry of Colonies. She married the writer Robert Antelme in 1939.
During the Second World War, she worked for the Vichy regime in an office managing paper quotas and joined the French Communist Party and the Resistance. Her husband was deported to Buchenwald in 1944, but survived. Duras nursed him back to health, but they later divorced.
She published her first novel, Les Impudents, in 1943 under the name Duras, taken from a village associated with her father. Her early work was conventional, although Moderato cantabile (1958), which won the Prix de Mai, marked a stylistic shift. It introduced her sparse, elliptical narrative style. The novel was adapted into Seven Days… Seven Nights (1960).
Her 1964 novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein was praised by Jacques Lacan, who remarked: "Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me". She later explored themes of eroticism and trauma in L'Homme assis dans le couloir (1980) and La Maladie de la mort (1982).
Her best-known novel, L'Amant (1984), fictionalised her adolescent relationship with a Chinese-Vietnamese man in colonial Indochina. It won the Prix Goncourt and was later made into a film by Jean-Jacques Annaud. The same period of her life also inspired The North China Lover, The Sea Wall and Eden Cinema.
Duras wrote and directed films such as India Song (1975) and Nathalie Granger (1972), for which she won several awards, including the Prix Jean-Cocteau in 1976. Her films rejected traditional narrative structure and separated image from dialogue. Scholars have described her work as a search for "an absolutely meaningful image".
Her last years were marked by illness, detoxification and her relationship with the actor Yann Andréa, which she documented in Yann Andréa Steiner (1992). Her last written words were: "I think it is all over… I have no more mouth, no more face".
Marguerite Duras passed away in Paris on March 3, 1996, at the age of 81.
