About

Prune Antoine is a French novelist and reporter whose work lies at the crossroads of literature and reportage. Her writing explores themes of violence, gender, justice, and power across Europe and beyond.

With a Master’s degree in International Law, she has lived in the UK, Spain, France, Hungary, Belgium, Cyprus, and Germany, shaping a cosmopolitan perspective that permeates her investigations and fiction.

Her reporting has taken her from the Baltic Sea – where she documented the ecological damage caused by sunken munitions and the remilitarisation of Kaliningrad – to the post-war landscapes of Kosovo and Bosnia, where she exposed ongoing impunity around war crimes, mass rapes, and organ trafficking. She has covered Ukraine in the aftermath of Maidan, Tunisia at the dawn of the Arab Spring, the Russian opposition alongside Pussy Riot, and authoritarian Belarus. More recently, she spent months embedded with the radical neo-Nazi group Der Dritte Weg to investigate Germany’s tolerance of the far right, and uncovered systemic moral and sexual abuse inside the European Parliament in the wake of #MeToo.

Her reporting has appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, Mediapart, Die Zeit, The Guardian, Vice, ARTE or France Télévisions. It has been awarded or selected for the European Press Prize, the True Story Award, the French-German Journalism Prize, and the Prix Louise Weiss.

Prune’s debut non-fiction book, La fille & le moudjahidine (Carnets Nord, 2015), is a raw, intimate chronicle of her friendship with a Dagestani MMA fighter and asylum seeker drawn to jihad in Syria, set against Europe’s struggle with islamic terrorism.

Her first novel, L’Heure d’été (Anne Carrière, 2019; Points, 2020), paints a vivid portrait of a Millennial couple navigating precarity, gentrification, and free love in Berlin. It was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt du premier roman.

Her latest book, La mère diabolique (Denoël, 2024), blends fiction and non-fiction to explore the harrowing case of Christiane K., accused of murdering five of her six children in Solingen during the COVID-19 lockdown. The text confronts the ambivalences of motherhood while exposing systemic gender bias in the criminal justice system. A German edition (Eine Frau in Deutschland, Hanser Berlin, 2025) was recently published and pre-optioned for screen adaptation.

Prune has been a Milena Jesenská Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, a guest journalist at the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg and a resident at Villa Albertine in Texas, U.S. She is represented by Laurence Laluyaux at RCW, London.

Alongside her literary career, she works as a senior strategist at McCann Paris, exploring how advertising stories can shape culture.