About

My name is Prune, and I am a (very) independent reporter and a novelist. Born in France in 1981, I graduated with a Master in International Law. I have lived in the U.K., Spain, Budapest, Brussels, Paris, and Nicosia before settling in Berlin in 2008.

I have worked for Le Nouvel Observateur, Médiapart, Médor, Reportagen, Die Zeit, Geo, Vice, The Guardian, Arte or France Télévisions. My reporting has been awarded or nominated for the European Press Prize, the True Story Award, the Franco-German Journalism Prize, the Prix Louise Weiss, and the Prix Philippe Chaffanjon.

Among many others, I have investigated the remilitarisation of Kaliningrad and the rhetoric of New Cold War in Europe, the organ trafficking scandals in Kosovo and the failures of international justice, the impunity of mass rapes during the war in Bosnia or the ecological damages of conflicts, such as the tons of chemical and conventional munitions dumped in the Baltic Sea after 1945. I researched Germany’s tolerance of the far-right, spending months embedded within a radical neo-nazi group called Der Dritte Weg. More recently, I have looked into the endemic sexual and moral abuses within the European Parliament and the lack of an efficient anti-harassment policy.

My debut non-fiction book, La fille & le moudjahidine (Carnets Nord, Paris, 2015) is an intense and evocative chronicle of my friendship with a Dagestani MMA fighter – a refugee in Germany drawn to jihad in Syria – as Europe grapples with the rising specter of islamic terrorism.

L’Heure d’été (Anne Carrière, Paris, 2019; reed. Points, 2020) paints a vivid portrait of the hopes and disillusions of a Millennials couple in Berlin struggling with precarity, gentrification, and free love in a rapidly changing Europe. L’heure d’été was finalist for the Prix Goncourt of the first novel.

La mère diabolique (Denoël, Paris, 2024) is an intimate deep dive into the Christiane K. criminal case in Germany, a mother accused of murdering five of her six children during the Covid-19 pandemic: condemned to a life long sentence, she always pled non guilty. An incisive exploration of the ambivalences of motherhood, La mère diabolique will be soon published in Germany by Hanser Berlin.

I was a Milena Jesenská Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and a journalist invited at the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg. In 2025, I will be a resident of the Villa Albertine in Texas, conducting literary research on mothers’ mental health in one of the most conservative state in the U.S.

Member of the reporters collective Longshot, I am represented by Laurence Laluyaux at RCW, London.