The son of a historian, Laurent Binet was born in Paris. He graduated from the
University of Paris with a degree in Literature. He spent four years singing and playing guitar with a rock band named Stalingrad. He teaches French in a Paris suburb and also at the
University of Saint-Denis. Binet was awarded the 2010
Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for his first novel,
HHhH. The novel recounts
the assassination of Nazi leader
Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. In August 2012, Binet published
Rien ne se passe comme prévu (Nothing goes as planned), a behind-the-scenes account of the successful presidential campaign of
François Hollande, which Binet witnessed while
embedded with Hollande's campaign staff. In 2015, he published his second novel,
La septième fonction du langage, which was translated in 2017 as
The Seventh Function of Language, a detective thriller dealing with a fictionalized account of
Roland Barthes's death. In 2019, he published
Civilizations, an
alternative history novel about the conquest of Europe by
Atahualpa. The novel was awarded the
Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 2019 and was published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The English translation won the
Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2022. In 2023, he published
Perspective(s), a novel set in Renaissance Florence. Its English translation was shortlisted for the
Dublin Literary Award in 2026. ==Works==