NDiaye, Marie

The French novelist and playwright Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, Loiret, about fifty kilometres south of Paris. When her brother Pap was three and Marie one, their Senegalese father went back to Senegal and they moved with their mother to the Paris suburb of Bourg-la-Reine. NDiaye has said she felt fortunate growing up in the safety of a middle-class Paris suburb although, "even though there were no social problems in my school, I still felt like an outsider."