orig. Marguerite Donnadieu
born April 4, 1914, Gia Dinh, Cochinchina
died March 3, 1996, Paris, France
French novelist, playwright, film director, and screenwriter.
Indochina was the setting for Duras's first successful novel, The Sea Wall (1950). Her writing grew increasingly minimal and abstract, and she is sometimes associated with the nouveau roman ("new novel") movement. Perhaps her best-known novel is the semiautobiographical The Lover (1984, Prix Goncourt; film, 1992), about a French teenage girl's love affair with an older Chinese man; she revised this work as The North China Lover (1991). Her original screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and her adaptation for film of her play India Song (1975) were highly acclaimed.