About

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

Holding a Master’s degree 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. She is currently investigating the crystal meth epidemic spreading across Central Europe and the high-profile case of the anti-fascist activist, Maja T.

Her work has appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur, Reportagen, Le Monde, Mediapart, Die Zeit, The Guardian, Vice, ARTE, and France Télévisions, and has been recognised by 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 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 Texas. She has spoken at the True Story Festival in Bern, phil.Cologne, the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, and the Night of Ideas in Houston.

She is currently working on her fourth book, set in Texas, and is represented by Laurence Laluyaux at RCW, London.