Tiphaine Samoyault

Tiphaine Samoyault (June 1968, Boulogne-Billancourt) is a French university lecturer, literary critic, and novelist, specializing in the work of Roland Barthes. She is the niece of harpsichordist Blandine Verlet and writer, academic and psychoanalyst Agnès Verlet. In 2015, she received the Grand Prize in Non-Fiction from the Société des gens de lettres.

Tiphaine Samoyault was born in Boulogne-Billancourt in June 1968. She grew up in Fontainebleau, in the Château de Fontainebleau, where her father, Jean-Pierre Samoyault, was curator. This childhood is evoked in her first novel, La Cour des Adieux, named after the cour d'Honneur of the palace, where Napoleon said his farewells.

Her childhood was immersed in music, notably at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, directed at the time by Nadia Boulanger, and located near her parents' apartments in the château. A graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Samoyault wrote her doctoral thesis on Romans-Mondes, les formes de la totalisation romanesque au vingtième siècle (1996) and her habilitation thesis on l'Actualité de la fiction : théorie, comparaison, traduction (2003).

After working at the Université Paris-VIII, she became Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3. Until June 2012, she headed the comparative literature department at Université Paris-VIII. A former resident of the Villa Médicis (2000–2001), Samoyault is also a novelist and translator of, among other works, portions of the new edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, and of David Shulman and Charles Malamoud's essay Ta'ayushn : journal d'un combat pour la paix : Israël Palestine, 2002-2005 (Le Seuil, 2006).

A member of the reading committee at Editions du Seuil, she also contributes to France Culture and was a contributor to La Quinzaine littéraire until September 2015.

She is a member of the editorial board of the online journal En attendant Nadeau. Since 2022, Samoyault has been writing a serial for Le Monde Livres.