Constance
Debré

Constance Debré was born in Paris in 1972. She attended the prestigious Lycée Henri IV preparatory school and later studied law at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University. After completing her studies, she worked as an attorney and defense lawyer in various capacities, for example, for her father who was charged with embezzlement in 2011 together with former French president Jacques Chirac. During this phase of her life, Debré also launched her literary career with Un peu là beaucoup ailleurs, for which she won the French literary prize Prix Contrepoint in 2005. In 2015, she gave up her law career and left her husband in order to dedicate herself fully to writing.

Debré’s novels are often autofictional. In them she works through her relationship to her celebrity family, her parents’ drug addiction, her coming-out as queer, as well as the legal battle for custody of her son. Her literary breakthrough came in 2018 with the publication of Play Boy, a biting and provocative reflection on her radical rejection of bourgeois Parisian life. In 2020 the illustrious publishing house Éditions Flammarion published Love Me Tender, in which Debré deepens her critique of the bourgeoisie, describes her path to self-determination as a queer woman, and explores freedom through forms of physical desire. Play Boy was Debré’s first work to be translated into German and was published in 2024 by Matthes & Seitz. The German translator of the novel, Max Henninger, has also prepared a German translation of Love Me Tender with the same publishers, forthcoming March 2025.

While her 2022 novel Nom revisits similar themes, Debré most recent work, Offenses from 2023, delves into the French legal system with a story about an elderly woman who is murdered by a drug addict due to financial problems.

Constance Debré holds the Samuel Fischer Visiting Professorship for Literature at the Peter Szondi Institute for General and Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin in the summer semester 2025.