“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it.” —Annie Ernaux

On April 8 at 6pm, join Neige Sinno as she discusses her internationally acclaimed, genre defying, and multiple prize winning book, Sad Tiger, (Seven Stories Press), with her US translator, Natasha Lehrer, and journalist Leslie Camhi.

Winner of many prestigious awards (including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the European Strega Prize, and the Goncourt Prizes in the US, the UK, Belgium, Slovakia, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and South Korea), Sad Tiger is based on a series of devastating events: From the age of seven until 14 or 16, Neige Sinno was sexually abused by her stepfather. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather, after which Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes, among others.

Sad Tiger—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”—is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book, there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? Amid so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

Sad Tiger will be released in the United States in April 2025. This work received support for excellence in publication and translation from the Albertine Translation Fund.

This event will be in English. It is free with RSVP. Click here for tickets.

The event is co-organized with Villa Albertine and is a part of the Authors on Tour program. Neige Sinno’s 2025 US tour is made possible by Seven Stories Press.

NEIGE SINNO is a French writer who has studied American literature in the United States and Mexico and worked as a translator and literature professor. She is the author of two previous books, Le Camion (Christophe Luquin) and La Vie des rats (La Tangente). Born in France, she has lived in Mexico for the past 20 years. Her 2023 book, Triste tigre (P.O.L.), won several of France’s top literary prizes and became the publishing sensation of the year. It will be published in English as Sad Tiger by Seven Stories and translated by Natasha Lehrer.

NATASHA LEHRER is a prize-winning writer, translator, and editor. Her long form journalism and book reviews have appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Haaretz, and Fantastic Man, among others. She has contributed to several books, including a chapter on France in Looking for an Enemy: 8 Essays on Antisemitism, edited by Jo Glanville (Short Books/Norton, 2022). The writers she has translated include Nathalie Léger, Chantal Thomas, Vanessa Springora, Amin Maalouf, Victor Segalen, Robert Desnos, and Georges Bataille. Her translations have been shortlisted and longlisted for several translation prizes, and in 2016 she was awarded the Scott Moncrieff prize for Suite for Barbara Loden.

LESLIE CAMHI’s first translation, from the French, of Violaine Huisman’s novel, The Book of Mother (Scribner) was a New York Times Notable Book of 2022 and long-listed for the International Booker Prize, among other honors. Her essays on art, literature, and women’s lives, including her own life and travels, appear regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue, and other publications. A frequent contributor to art museum catalogs, she also holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Yale, and her scholarly work includes essays on kleptomania and 19^th-century French medical photography.

Photo credit: © Mahe Elipe