The successful novelist Françoise Bourdin, one of the most widely read books in France with more than 15 million books sold, died on Sunday at the age of 70, the Editis publishing group told the AFP news agency on Monday.
Unknown to the literary world, Françoise Bourdin is the author of almost fifty books that have had great success, some of which have been adapted for television.
“I send my sincere condolences to the family of Françoise Bourdin, her two daughters Fabienne and Frédérique, her grandchildren, I think of all the Belfond, Plön and Pocket teams who have worked with her for so many years, as well as her millions of faithful Readers,” said the group’s chief executive, Michèle Benbunan, in a press release sent to AFP.
His latest book “Un si beau horizon” was published by Plon Editions in early 2022.
Often referred to as “popular”, his work, which began in the 1970s, remained in the shadow of Guillaume Musso, for example.
“There’s a certain contempt for popular literature,” she lamented in a 2019 interview with AFP. “People who despise what I write obviously never read a single paragraph of it. It’s very unfair. It is a priori elitist”.
At the center of his literary work? The family saga.
She published her first novel “The Wet Suns” in 1972, when she was still a minor. A second novel, De Vagues Herbes Jaunes, was published the following year and adapted for television by Josée Dayan.
The novelist, based in a large Norman farmhouse in the Seine valley not far from Giverny, was always at her computer at dawn to write.
“When inspiration doesn’t come, I take my dogs for a walk in the woods,” she said, while her two canine companions, a border collie and a beauceron, came over to beg for a cuddle. Most of the time the inspiration was there.
She was extremely prolific, publishing a novel every year or even two.