Tatiana de Rosnay (born 28 September 1961) is a French-British writer.
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Life and career
Tatiana de Rosnay was born on 28 September 1961 in the suburbs of Paris. She is of English, French and Russian descent. Her father is French scientist Joël de Rosnay, her grandfather was painter Gaëtan de Rosnay and they were born in Mauritius. Rosnay's paternal great-grandmother was Russian actress Natalia Rachewskïa, director of the Leningrad Pushkin Theatre from 1925 to 1949.
Rosnay's mother, Stella Jebb, is English, daughter of diplomat and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Gladwyn Jebb, and great-great-granddaughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the British engineer. Rosnay is also the niece of historian Hugh Thomas. Rosnay was raised in Paris and then in Boston, when her father taught at MIT in the 1970s. She moved to England in the early 1980s and obtained a bachelor's degree in English literature at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. On her return to Paris in 1984, she was a press officer, then became a journalist and literary critic for the magazine Psychologies.
Since 1992, Rosnay has published more than twenty volumes of fiction in French and English. She has also worked on the series Family Affairs for which she has written two episodes with the screenwriter Pierre-Yves Lebert. This series was broadcast on TF1 during the summer of 2000.
In 2007, Rosnay published her most popular novel, Sarah's Key. According to her French publisher, it had sold 758,000 copies worldwide by November 2008 and had passed two million copies worldwide by late 2010, reaching this milestone even before the film version was released. Rosnay's U.S. publisher suggests that the global total had reached four million copies by the northern summer of 2011, and eleven million copies by 2020.
The film version — Elle s'appelait Sarah, or Sarah's Key in anglophone markets — was directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, with a screenplay by Paquet-Brenner and Serge Joncour, and with Kristin Scott Thomas as Julia. It opened in France on 13 October 2010 and in the United States, where the book enjoyed great success, on 22 July 2011.
Rosnay has twice appeared in the annual list of the ten top-selling French authors produced by market researcher GfK for the French daily Le Figaro, ranking fifth in 2010 and sixth in 2011.
Published works
Fiction
L'Appartement témoin, Fayard, 1992
Mariés, pères de famille, short stories, Plon, 1995
Le Dîner des ex, Plon, 1996 — reissued in pocket format as Partition amoureuse
Le Cœur d'une autre, Plon, 1998
Le Voisin, Plon, 2000
La Mémoire des Murs, Plon, 2003
Spirales, Plon, 2004
Moka, Plon, 2005
Amsterdamnation et autres nouvelles, short stories, Plon, 2013
Café Lowendal et autres nouvelles, short stories, Le Livre de Poche, 2014
Son carnet rouge, short stories, Héloïse d'Ormesson, 2014
A Paris Affair: Stories, St. Martin's Press, 2015, translated into English by Sam Taylor
Les Fleurs de l'ombre, Robert Laffont and Héloïse d'Ormesson, 2020
Flowers of Darkness, St. Martin's Press, 2021
L'Envers du décor et autres nouvelles, short stories, Pocket, 2020
Célestine du Bac, Robert Laffont and Héloïse d'Ormesson, 2021
Nous irons mieux demain, Robert Laffont, 2022
Leurs petites vies et autres nouvelles, short stories, Le Livre de Poche, 2024
Nonfiction
Manderley for ever, Albin Michel and Héloïse d'Ormesson, 2015
Manderley Forever: A Biography of Daphne du Maurier, St. Martin's Press, 2017, translated into English by Sam Taylor
Tamara par Tatiana, sur les traces de Tamara de Lempicka, Michel Lafon, 2018