About

Prune Antoine is a Berlin-based French writer, whose work moves between investigative journalism, non-fiction, and fiction.

Trained in international law, she has lived across the continent, from the UK and Spain to Hungary, Belgium, Paris or Cyprus.

Her reporting has taken her from the Baltic Sea, where she documented the ecological damage caused by WWII 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. 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 sexual and moral abuse within the European Parliament in the wake of #MeToo. Her recent work has focused on the crystal meth epidemic sweeping Central Europe and on the high-profile prosecution of anti-fascist activist Maja T.

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

Her debut non-fiction book, La fille & le moudjahidine (Carnets Nord, 2015), chronicles her friendship with a Dagestani MMA fighter and asylum seeker drawn to jihad in Syria, set against Europe’s reckoning with islamic terrorism. Her first novel, L’Heure d’été (Anne Carrière, 2019), follows 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 examine the case of Christiane K., accused of murdering five of her six children in Solingen during the COVID-19 lockdown. The story confronts the ambivalences of motherhood while exposing gender bias in the criminal justice system. A German edition, Eine Frau in Deutschland (Hanser Berlin), has been pre-optioned for screen adaptation.

Prune is a member of the PrepCom of the European Press Prize and has held residencies at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna, the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg, and the Villa Albertine in the U.S. She also writes In Between, a newsletter on the hidden side of reporting and conversations with women writing narrative nonfiction and is currently completing her fourth book, set in Texas. She is represented by Laurence Laluyaux at RCW, London.