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, Reportagen, Die Zeit, Geo, Vice, The Guardian, Arte or France Télévisions. My pieces have 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.

My debut non-fiction book, « La Fille & Le Moudjahidine » (Carnets Nord, Paris, 2015), chronicles my friendship with a Dagestani MMA fighter, a refugee in Germany who flirts with jihad in Syria, while Europe tilts in fear of islamic terrorism. My novel « L’Heure d’été » (Anne Carrière, Paris, 2019; paperback reedition by Points, 2020) looks into the hopes and disillusions of a couple of Millenials in Berlin, struggling with precarity, gentrification and free love – in a Europe on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The book was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt of the First novel.

More recently, I delved into Germany’s tolerance of the far-right, spending months embedded within a radical neo-Nazi group called Der Dritte Weg. I covered the endemic sexual and moral harassment within the European Parliament. My latest story about the Christiane K. criminal case, an in-depth investigation into gender bias in the penal justice system and the ambivalences of motherhood, will soon be published by Denoël in France and Hanser Verlag in Germany.

I was a Milena Jesenská 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 women’s mental health in one of the most conservative states in the U.S.

I am represented by Laurence Laluyaux at RCW, London.