Tiphaine Samoyault

Tiphaine Samoyault studied at École Normale Supérieure and Paris 8 University. The recorded working language is French. Employment is recorded with Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, Paris 8 University and Éditions du Seuil. Positions recorded include editor-in-chief. Distinctions recorded are resident at the Villa Medici.

Tiphaine Samoyault was born in Boulogne-Billancourt in June 1968. She grew up in Fontainebleau, in the Château de Fontainebleau, where her father, Jean-Pierre Samoyault, was curator. This childhood is evoked in her first novel, La Cour des Adieux, named after the cour d'Honneur of the palace, where Napoleon said his farewells. Her childhood was immersed in music, notably at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, directed at the time by Nadia Boulanger, and located near her parents' apartments in the château. A graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Samoyault wrote her doctoral thesis on Romans-Mondes, les formes de la totalisation romanesque au vingtième siècle (1996) and her habilitation thesis on l'Actualité de la fiction: théorie, comparaison, traduction (2003).

• Illustration — Claire Nadeau, Maurice Nadeau, and Tiphaine Samoyault (l-r) (2011) After working at the Université Paris-VIII, she became Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3. Until June 2012, she headed the comparative literature department at Université Paris-VIII. A former resident of the Villa Médicis (2000–2001), Samoyault is also a novelist and translator of, among other works, portions of the new edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, and of David Shulman and Charles Malamoud's essay Ta'ayushn: journal d'un combat pour la paix: Israël Palestine, 2002-2005 (Le Seuil, 2006). A member of the reading committee at Editions du Seuil, she also contributes to France Culture and was a contributor to La Quinzaine littéraire until September 2015. She is a member of the editorial board of the online journal En attendant Nadeau. Since 2022, Samoyault has been writing a serial for Le Monde Livres.

• Excès du roman: essai, Paris, Maurice Nadeau, 1999 • Littérature et mémoire du présent, Nantes, Pleins feux, 2001 (fascicule) • L'intertextualité: mémoire de la littérature, Paris, Nathan, 2001; rééd. A. Colin, Paris, 2005 • La montre cassée: forme et signification d'un motif dans les arts du temps, Verdier, Lagrasse, 2004 • Traduction et violence, Seuil, 2020

• Le monde des pictogrammes, Paris, Circonflexe, 1995 - English edition: Alphabetical order: how the alphabet began, New York, Penguin / Viking, 1996

• Roland Barthes, Paris, Le Seuil, 2015

• La Cour des adieux, Maurice Nadeau, Paris, 1999 • Météorologie du rêve, Le Seuil, Paris, 2000 • Les Indulgences, Le Seuil, Paris, 2003 • La Main négative, Editions Argol, Paris, 2008 • Bête de cirque, Le Seuil, Paris, 2013