Nathalie Azoulai

Nathalie Azoulai is a graduate of École Normale Supérieure, holds an agrégation in modern French literature, and is the author of ten novels, as well as plays and children’s books. Before becoming a writer, she was a teacher then a publisher. Experience in audiovisual production of screenplays for films, television and radio confirmed and expanded her love of language and writing. Her first book, Mère Agitée, about a young woman dealing with the ups and downs of motherhood, was published in 2002 and received favourable reviews. Her 2005 novel Les Manifestations, set against the background of the political demonstrations that took place in France from the 1980s to the 2000s, looks at the difficulties of maintaining friendships over two decades. Throughout this time, Azoulai continued to organise and lead writing workshops at Sciences Po Paris, CELSA Sorbonne and as part of Gallimard’s Nouvelle Revue Française. In 2015 she was awarded the Prix Médicis for her novel Titus n’aimait pas Bérénice, which is built around Racine’s tragedy, Bérénice. Clic-Clac (2019) was adapted for stage and performed at Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris in 2021.

Python is a form of self-interrogation. A fifty-year old female writer and academic – a woman very much like Nathalie Azoulai – deep dives into the world of coding and encoders: the young people (mostly men) who write the codes that the world’s tools and machines run on. Azoulai looks at this abundance of signs, machine languages, and compares it with the language she knows and uses: human language, literary language. How do they relate one to the other? How does a writer see all these efficient, performative languages (does every line of code carry out an operation)? What does the future hold for this proliferation of codes? Part novel, part essay, Python recounts an initiation and a journey which together reveal a new mythology. Nathalie Azoulai immerses herself in a country where everything appears to be in code and the alphabet impenetrable. Thus Japan becomes a real-life metaphor for decoding.

Portrait : © Bamberger