Fatima Daas is a French author of Algerian origin. She grew up in Clichy-sous-Bois, surrounded by a large family. At secondary school, she rebelled, asserted her right to express her ideas and wrote her first pieces. She was recognised for her writing talent and went on to study literature. She describes herself as an intersectional feminist. The sensation of the 2020 literary season, La petite dernière (The Little Sister) (Notabilia, 2020; Le Livre de poche, 2021), her debut novel—which received extraordinary praise from Virginie Despentes—grabs the cover of Les Inrocks and wins its literary prize; it is also honoured in Germany with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Prize. Its author, then aged 25, suddenly propelled into the limelight, established herself as the revelation of the season – a fiercely contemporary voice that refuses to be reduced to sociology; an intimate voice with universal power, one that ceaselessly questions her multiple identities – as a woman, a Frenchwoman, a Muslim, the daughter of Algerian immigrants, and a lesbian – and her ability to reconcile them without betraying any of them.
For Fatima Daas, writing is therefore the only space where ambivalence can be experienced without posing a threat, where she does not have to suppress a part of herself in order to be accepted. In her second novel, Jouer le jeu (Play the Game), published in 2025 by Éditions de L’Olivier, she explores a subject close to her heart: the aspirations of teenagers and the way in which these can be stifled by the education system. She offers us a poignant novel about the possibility of altering a fate that appears to be predetermined, about ambition, the search for identity and the need to reinvent oneself.