Lola Lafon

Leading French feminist intellectual and novelist Lola Lafon talks about her prize-winning reflection on Anne Frank, on her own family’s experience of the Holocaust and on her own loss of a childhood friend.

Lafon was given permission to spend a night alone in the room in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid away from the Nazis. It led her to explore the stories told about Anne Frank and to look for the disciplined writer at the heart of the Anne Frank myth. Lafon reflects on what it means to lose loved ones, including her own family’s losses during the Holocaust and her own loss of a childhood friend to the Khmer Rouge. She asks us to consider how we deal with loss and asks why women write when faced with danger and confinement.

Lafon is a French writer who grew up in Eastern Europe. Her books include The Little Communist Who Never Smiled and Reeling: A Novel. When You Listen to This Song won the Grand Prix des Lectrices ELLE literary prize for non-fiction.

Part of the festival’s programme of Jewish and Hebrew literature and culture and part of the Voices of Europe programme.