Queer books: 16 authors from France and Germany to read
If you are discovering French and German queer literature, here are sixteen authors to know, sorted by country and date of birth. For each one: the book to enter their work through, the year of publication, the prizes received, and why it matters. This is a starting selection, not a ranking: more authors will come, and each book will get its own page.
If you could only read five: En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014, The End of Eddy), the story of a gay child in a working-class village in northern France; À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (1990, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life), to understand what AIDS meant for gay writers; La Petite Dernière (2020, The Last One), the novel of a young Muslim lesbian in the Paris suburbs; Blutbuch (2022), the novel of a non-binary person, German Book Prize 2022; Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951, Memoirs of Hadrian), for love between men told by a major woman writer of the twentieth century.
A few books below speak of violence, illness, suicide or sexuality explicitly: we say so each time.
Germany
Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912)
A novella: an ageing writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, stays in Venice and falls in love from afar with a Polish teenage boy, Tadzio, while the city is struck by cholera. A classic of German literature, often read as the story of a desire one dares not admit. Thomas Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, "principally for his great novel Buddenbrooks" (1901), not for this novella.
Klaus Mann, Der fromme Tanz (1925)
Thomas Mann's eldest son, Klaus (1906–1949), wrote this first novel at 19, about young people in 1920s Germany. Openly gay, he left Germany in March 1933, founded the exile magazine Die Sammlung in Amsterdam (1933–1935) and was stripped of his German citizenship in 1934. His novel Mephisto (written in 1936) tells of the rise of an actor who puts himself at the service of the Nazis; it stayed banned in West Germany after a lawsuit, then was published in 1981. He died in Cannes in 1949.
Hubert Fichte, Das Waisenhaus (1965) and Detlevs Imitationen "Grünspan" (1971)
Hubert Fichte (1935–1986), a writer from Hamburg, wrote openly gay novels that matter in post-war German literature: childhood in an orphanage during the war (Das Waisenhaus), then the bar scene of Hamburg (Die Palette, 1968) and Detlevs Imitationen "Grünspan" (1971). His great unfinished cycle, Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit, follows a homosexual writer, "Jäcki", and his older partner, "Irma". Hermann Hesse Prize in 1965; the city of Hamburg has awarded the Hubert Fichte Prize since 1995. He died of an AIDS-related illness in 1986.
Ronald M. Schernikau, Kleinstadtnovelle (1980) and legende (1991)
Schernikau (died 1991) published a first novel very young, Kleinstadtnovelle (Rotbuch, 1980), about a gay teenager in a small town. A communist, he was one of the last West Germans to move to the GDR: he studied at the Johannes R. Becher Institute for Literature in Leipzig from 1986 to 1989, the first West German to do so. He finished his big novel legende in September 1991 and died of AIDS on 20 October 1991 in Berlin, a few weeks later.
Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Außer sich (2017)
Born in Volgograd in 1985, in Germany since 1995, Salzmann published with Suhrkamp a first novel about twins, Alissa and Anton: from post-Soviet Moscow to a refugee centre in West Germany. Anton disappears; a postcard from Istanbul sends Alissa searching for him, and for a sense of belonging that goes beyond country, language or gender. German Book Prize shortlist 2017, Jürgen Ponto Foundation Prize 2017 (first novel) and Mara Cassens Prize 2017. Salzmann has since received the Hermann Hesse Prize (2022) and the Kleist Prize (2024).
Kim de l'Horizon, Blutbuch (2022)
Kim de l'Horizon's first novel; the author was born in Switzerland and identifies as neither male nor female. The narrator, Kim, who is non-binary, addresses their grandmother, who has dementia, and recounts, over about 300 pages, childhood, pain, social class and language in a world fixated on two genders. Published by DuMont, it won the German Book Prize on 16 October 2022, then the Swiss Book Prize 2022, and had already won the Jürgen Ponto Foundation prize. It is the novel to read to know what German-language queer literature can say today.
France
Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrah, 1921–1922)
In In Search of Lost Time, Proust (1871–1922) devotes an entire volume to homosexuality, with the Baron de Charlus and his male loves, and also speaks of desire between women (Albertine). Goncourt Prize 1919 for À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove), another volume of the same novel. Sodome et Gomorrhe came out in two parts, in 1921 and then 1922, the year of his death. A long read, easier to enter through this volume than through the beginning.
André Gide, Corydon (1924)
André Gide (1869–1951) wrote Corydon in 1918 and published it in 1924: a Socratic dialogue that defends homosexuality, heavily attacked when it came out, including by close friends. He added his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die…), which tells how he discovered his desire on a trip to North Africa in 1893, then novels such as L'Immoraliste (1902) and Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926). Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.
Jean Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers, 1943)
Written in prison in 1942, published in 1943 thanks to Jean Cocteau, this first novel tells of the world of drag queens and thugs in Montmartre around Divine; it celebrates beauty in crime and shame. It was followed by Miracle de la rose, Journal du voleur (The Thief's Journal, 1949), Querelle de Brest (written in 1947, published in 1953) and the film Un chant d'amour (1950, see our queer cinema). Threatened with life imprisonment, Genet was pardoned by the President of the Republic in 1949 on a petition from Cocteau, Sartre and Picasso, among others. He died in 1986. Explicit passages.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian, 1951)
A first-person novel: the Roman emperor Hadrian, old and ill, writes to Marcus Aurelius. He speaks of his life and of his love for the young Antinous. Prix Femina-Vacaresco in 1952; Yourcenar (1903–1987) later received the Prix Femina (1968, for L'Œuvre au noir) and the Grand Prix de l'Académie française (1977). Elected to the Académie française in 1980, she was its first woman member. She lived for more than forty years with Grace Frick (from 1937 until Frick's death in 1979) in the United States; they are buried side by side in Maine.
Monique Wittig, L'Opoponax (1964) and Le Corps lesbien (The Lesbian Body, 1973)
Monique Wittig (1935–2003) received the Prix Médicis 1964 for her first novel, L'Opoponax, about childhood seen through a little girl. Les Guérillères (1969) imagines women warriors who overturn the patriarchal world; Le Corps lesbien (1973) is a long prose poem about love between women. A feminist activist, she wrote essays that shaped queer thought ("One Is Not Born a Woman", "The Straight Mind"). She moved to the United States, where she died in 2003.
Hervé Guibert, À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (1990)
Published by Gallimard in 1990, the story of the illness and friendships of a writer with AIDS, barely fictionalised (the names are changed). It publicly revealed Guibert's HIV status and earned him a famous invitation to the TV show Apostrophes. About 400,000 copies sold by 1994; Prix Colette in 1990. A monument of AIDS literature, hard to read. Guibert died in 1991.
Guillaume Dustan, Dans ma chambre (1996)
Guillaume Dustan (1965–2005) is a leading figure of 1990s Parisian gay literature. Dans ma chambre (1996, In My Room), Je sors ce soir and Plus fort que moi (1997) tell, as autofiction, the sexual and nocturnal life of gay men in Paris. He ran the "Le Rayon gay" collection at Balland and defended positions on condomless sex that set him against Act Up. Prix de Flore 1999 for Nicolas Pages. Sexually explicit.
Didier Eribon, Réflexions sur la question gay (1999) and Retour à Reims (2009)
Didier Eribon is a sociologist and philosopher; he wrote a biography of Michel Foucault (1989). Réflexions sur la question gay (1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self) explores insult as the maker of gay identity. Retour à Reims (2009, Returning to Reims) tells of the return to his working-class family: Édouard Louis says this book changed his future as a writer. A stage adaptation was played in 2014 and a film came out in 2021.
Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (2014)
Born in 1992, Édouard Louis, born Eddy Bellegueule, tells in his first novel of his childhood in a village in Picardy: poverty, everyday racism and the homophobia of those around him. He received the Pierre Guénin Prize in 2014, which honours the fight against homophobia. His next books are Histoire de la violence (2016), Qui a tué mon père (2018), Changer : méthode (2021). Violence, insults, assaults: read with these warnings.
Fatima Daas, La Petite Dernière (2020)
Fatima Daas (a pseudonym, born 1995), Muslim and a lesbian, describes in her first novel, published by Noir sur Blanc on 20 August 2020, a young woman from Clichy-sous-Bois who tries to reconcile her faith, her family and her desire. Les Inrockuptibles First Novel Prize 2020; the German translation (Die jüngste Tochter) was shortlisted for the 2021 Internationaler Literaturpreis of Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The novel gave rise to Hafsia Herzi's film La Petite Dernière, Queer Palm at Cannes in 2025 (see our festivals).
What comes next
This selection is a starting point. We are preparing one page per book (editions, translations, adaptations, places), and other names: Colette, Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir, Renaud Camus, Paul B. Preciado, Virginie Despentes, as well as German and Austrian authors to be checked. See also our queer cinema and festivals. A book that should be here? Write to us.
Sources
Each entry relies on the Wikipedia page of the author and of the book, cross-checked with: Nobel Prize, Gide; Britannica, Gide; Nobel 1929; ORF, German Book Prize 2022; SRF, Swiss Book Prize 2022; Suhrkamp, Salzmann and German Book Prize 2017; HKW, Fatima Daas; Wikiwand, Genet, Yourcenar, Dustan, Eribon. Years and prizes are those published at the time of release; please tell us about any mistake.