by Jeanne Benameur

translated from the French by Bill Johnston

Publication date: 24 November 2025

She walks alone, leaving no footprints on the sand, and her thought ‘stitches the pieces of the world back together’. She steps from one word to the next and traces signs in the dust of the future. For Jeanne Benameur, who with a grammar of the world delivers her most personal work to date, the Egyptian goddess Isis is a sister who advances with her along the seashore. Like her, poetry responds to life’s call where the blue of the sky mingles with the blue of the sea. Like time, she is at work in our lives, like the words for which we are ‘the temporary dwelling’, like a waking dream, a calming thought: she is is unity rediscovered.

A meditation on exile, language, writing and identity which takes as inspiration the myths of Ancient Egypt, this is Les Fugitives’ first poetry publication by the author of The Child Who (2022).

Drawing on subjects as diverse as the author’s traumatic childhood flight from the Algerian War of Independence, the modern migrant crisis, the transformative power of writing, the freedom of second-language literacy, and the long history of the Mediterranean, a grammar of the world is brought into harmony by the central figure of the Egyptian goddess, who personifies a careful reknitting of the world and repairing of ancient wounds through the act of writing.

Jeanne Benameur is a prolific and bestselling novelist in France, where her first book, the poetry collection Naissance de l’oubli, was published in 1987.

'In Jeanne Benameur's language all is fluttering, gentle and stirring. Places are foremost, they precede us, then history settles in and the writing unfurls.'
— Cécile Coulon, author of A Beast in Paradise

'Jeanne is a thinker: even when she dances, she thinks. She has Atlantic thoughts that also turn towards the Aegean Sea, which is to say that, for her, the backwash of Algerian history flows back into the sea of inner feelings.'
— Yasmine Chouaki, Radio France Internationale

Praise for The Child Who:

‘Jeanne Benameur writes with uncommon beauty.’
— Rónán Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul

Paperback original
66 pages, 180 × 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-0683001-1-0