About

Prune Antoine is a French novelist and reporter based between Berlin and Paris. Her work sits at the intersection of investigative journalism and literature, exploring violence, gender, justice, and power across Europe and beyond. With a Master’s degree in International Law and years spent living in the UK, Spain, France, Hungary, Belgium, Cyprus or Germany, she brings a deeply international perspective to her storytelling.

Her investigations have taken her from the shores of the Baltic Sea – documenting ecological damage from dumped munitions and the remilitarisation of Kaliningrad – to the post-war landscapes of Kosovo and Bosnia, where she exposed impunity for war crimes, such as mass rapes and organ’s trafficking. Prune has reported from Ukraine in the aftermath of Maidan to Tunisia on the brink of the Arab Spring, from the anti-Putin resistance alongside Pussy Riot in Moscow to authoritarian Belarus, where the beauty industry is wielded as a political tool, from the frozen conflict in South Ossetia to the abortion ban in Poland. More recently, she spent months embedded with the radical neo-Nazi group Der Dritte Weg, tackling Germany’s tolerance to extreme right and also uncovered systemic moral and sexual abuses within 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 and a guest journalist at the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg. In 2025, she was a resident at Villa Albertine in Texas, researching maternal mental health in one of the most conservative states in the U.S.

She is represented by Laurence Laluyaux at RCW, London.