Mazarine Pingeot

Mazarine Pingeot

Mazarine Pingeot in 2006.
Born Mazarine Marie Pingeot
18 December 1974
Avignon
Nationality French
Occupation journalist, writer, professor

Mazarine Marie Pingeot (born 18 December 1974 in Avignon, Vaucluse), who changed her name to Mazarine Marie Pingeot-Mitterrand in 2005, is a writer, journalist and professor.

Biography

Pingeot is the daughter of former French president François Mitterrand and his mistress Anne Pingeot. She is said to be named after the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the oldest library in France, because of her parents' love for books. The existence of this daughter of president Mitterrand was long hidden from the press. Ensuring confidentiality about it was one of the motivations behind some of the illegal wiretapping that Mitterrand ordered under the guise of fighting terrorism.

She was a student first at the elite lycée Henri-IV in Paris and then at the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud (now named the École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines), a highly prestigious school. In 1997 she passed the agrégation de philosophie, and then started to write her Ph.D. thesis on the philosopher Spinoza, working as an assistant at the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I.

She is also a journalist (writing for ELLE magazine between 1999 and 2001) and a television anchor (on a French cable television channel, Paris Première).

Works

In 1998, she published her first novel, titled Premier Roman ("First Novel"), which was not highly praised by critics but was translated into many languages, including English. In 2000 she published Zeyn or the Reconquest, for which Charles Bremner of The Times wrote "If there was a prize for braving the ridicule of critics, it would go to Mazarine Pingeot" (8 May 2000). In 2003, she published a series of literary comments, "They told me who I was" ("they" being the books). In February 2005, she published her fourth book, Not a Word, a diary about her childhood life as a national secret. In 2007 she published her fifth book, Le Cimetière des poupées (The Cemetery of the Dolls), a novel about a woman who kills her baby and puts it in a freezer.

Family

She has one son, Astor, (born 11 July 2005) and two daughters: Tara (born 5 October 2007) and Marie (born 21 December 2009) with her former partner Mohamed Ulad-Mohand, a movie director.

External links