Mothers, Daughters, and the Supernatural: A Conversation with Marie NDiaye

About The Witch

Set in a small French town, The Witch follows Lucie, born into a lineage of women whose supernatural gifts are passed from mother to daughter. Long forced into silence by fear and male authority, Lucie defies her controlling husband and initiates her twin daughters into their inheritance, setting in motion a transformation that is both ecstatic and terrifying.

Dreamlike yet deeply psychological, the novel explores the fragile bonds between mothers and daughters, the cost of power and of repressing it, and the moment when children become freer and more dangerous than their parents. With mounting tension and emotional precision, NDiaye captures the unsettling truth that love, freedom, and fear often grow from the same roots.

About the Author

Since then she has established herself as one of the most important writers working in French today, publishing across multiple genres to ever-greater critical acclaim, notably with the Prix Femina for Rosie Carpe (2001; Rosie Carpe, 2004). Her play Papa doit manger entered the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, a rare distinction for a living writer. She also co-wrote the screenplay for White Material with director Claire Denis.

Her work is widely translated and studied internationally. Her previous novel in English, Vengeance Is Mine (2023), was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, TIME, and The Washington Post. Across fiction, theater, and film, her writing is recognized for its psychological depth and its exploration of identity, power, and family relationships.

About the Moderator

Shuchi Saraswat is a writer and editor based in Boston. Her essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Orion, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and have earned special mentions in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. In 2024, her novel-in-progress received a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation and was shortlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize.

A passionate advocate for international and cross-cultural storytelling, she spent a decade as a bookseller in Massachusetts, during which she founded the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith. She's now the senior editor of the international literary magazine, AGNI.