Biography

Born in 1959, Yasmina Reza evolves as from childhood in a both artistic and cosmopolitan atmosphere. She studied sociology and theater at the University of Nanterre.

Actress and then stage director, nourished by Nathalie Sarraute's theatre, Yasmina Reza wrote her first play in 1987, Conversation après un enterrement, followed in 1989 by La Traversée de l'hiver. In 1994, she became a playwright of international renown thanks to Art, a play translated into twenty languages which received numerous awards including a Tony Award for the best author in the United States.

In 1997, she published a collection of short autobiographical stories where melancholy is doubled with caustic verve : Hammerklavier. Angry outbursts against the contemporary world, broken down into 45 chapters that, once assembled, form a strange melody, both furious and passionate.

Her first novel, Une désolation (1999) confronts two philosophies of life. With a bitter irony, she plays characters haunted by time, her favorite theme. In fact, her work seems to be an attempt to trap the passing of time; "All my characters are in the middle of their lives with a feeling of tumbling towards death. This is something that I've always felt. Even at 20 years of age. This feeling of lack of time and tumbling towards death."

In 1999, she wrote the screenplay for the Pique-Nique de Lulu Kreutz, her companion, Didier Martiny's film, before returning to the theater with Trois versions d'une vie (2000) where she played herself an alcoholic wife, blundering, comical and hysterical.

Adam Haberberg (2003, reissued under the title of Hommes qui ne savent pas être aimés), is a novel about the fragility and loneliness of human beings, human weakness. "My characters are people who are slipping, who are bogged down, who are great impulsives and who eventually melt all conveniences and generally have a rather pessimistic view of the world."

Also in 2003, she wrote for the director Luc Bondy Une pièce espagnole. A play in layers where the characters are first supposed to be actors rehearsing the play in question.

In 2005, Yasmina Reza published two small books : Nulle part, an autobiographical text that echoes Hammerklavier and Dans la luge de Schopenhauer, that mocks philosophy as a way of life. In the first booklet, she gathers her memories and questions herself about her origins. "With infinite lightness and great modesty, the stateless Yasmina probes the mystery of identity, wonders, questions herself. She, who's past has the appearance of unfound ground, a rocky field where we try in vain to dig a grave. [...] Echoing this little gem, Dans la luge de Schopenhauer meets the same obsessions. It relates the story, with several voices, of an ill thinker, a disciple of Althusser that philosophy has not saved. Yasmina rather lies in a sort of Carpe diem, in an assumed frivolity, in reasoned lightness. Like a dressing placed on oblivion." (Olivier Le Naire, L'Express, 29th August 2005)

In Le dieu du carnage (2007), she mixes the banal of everyday with the singularity of our humanities. Initially, a fight between two adolescents. To resolve their dispute, two couples lock themselves away in polite privacy that turns into a carnage. "Le dieu du carnage, is a bit Courteline in the era of Nathalie Sarraute. That is to say, we fight like cats with backgrounds exploring the unconscious and words that often express the opposite of deep thought." (Gilles Costaz, Les Echos). The play was adapted into a film by Roman Polanski in 2011.

To write L'Aube le soir ou la nuit (2007), Yasmina Reza followed Nicolas Sarkozy for months inorder to develop the literary portrait of a man out to conquer power. "Unlike political journalists who tend to focus on the strategies, on the key moments of a campaign, Yasmina Reza focused only on the man in conquest." (Carl Meeus, Le Figaro Magazine, August 25th, 2007 )

"Like Nathalie Oppenheim, the writer that we find in the heart of her most recent play, Comment vous racontez la partie (2011), an acid text created at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in october but not yet mounted in Paris, the woman practices a biting literature, without lard." (Alexander Filon, Lire, February 2013)

Heureux les heureux (2013) is "a human comedy cruelly just. A choral novel, the most accomplished of its author, which fits together with virtuosity beings and stories. And, throughout, deals with subjects as universal as love and friendship, life and death, the couple and the family. [...] From the side scenes where she pulls the strings and orchestras the ballet of her heroes struggling with daily life, Yasmina Reza looks at the men and women of all ages, with the same address. Her skilled art of situations and dialogues, her sense of rhythm and detail, allow her to dig into the weaknesses and cracks of each one. To expose their dreams and disappointments. The novelist's dosage is perfect: a tasty blend of lightheartedness, gravity and mystery. Totally seduced the reader sometimes laughs and sometimes has a heavy heart. As in life that gives and takes, that exalts and grinds. That which Yasmina Reza shows better than anyone." (Alexander Filon, Lire, February 2013)