1967 Amélie Nothomb was born in Kobe, Japan. Her father was the Belgian ambassador and she joined a family notable for its writers and politicians. Experiences of Japan and childhood later informed the novel Métaphysique des tubes.
Because of her father’s occupation, much of Nothomb’s childhood was spent abroad, in places as diverse as China, Laos, Bangladesh, Burma and America.

1972-1975 Nothomb arrived in China from Japan at age five and the family lived in the multinational diplomatic enclave of San Li Tun in Peking. Le Sabotage amoureux drew on experiences of this time, detailing alliances and conflicts between the area’s children when the notorious ‘Gang of Four’ ruled China.

The sudden transition from a Japanese culture whose elevated sense of aesthetics demanded beauty in everything to a Peking saturated with ugliness during the Cultural Revolution has informed both the themes of Nothomb’s writing and her personal worldview. She has claimed that a harsh binary division between the gorgeous and the grotesque along with nostalgia for a lost beauty was coded into her perceptions at this time.

1978 After leaving China, the family relocated to New York. However their stay in the West was brief as her father’s involvement with the United Nations led to a new post in Asia.

The family moved to Bangladesh where Nothomb experienced personal isolation and encountered extreme human misery. She had little in common with local children and forays into the street led her to see damaged and dead people lying abandoned. She has claimed since that this type of exposure prompted both a heightened sensitivity to social injustices and a desire to escape from such disturbing stimuli through reading. For example, in the leper house that their parents supported, she and her sister Juliette tried to effect a double insulation from the horrors around them by shutting themselves in the quiet room reserved for them and immersing themselves in literature.

Diplomatic postings to Laos and Burma followed Banglaldesh. Lack of access to schools and established libraries meant that Nothomb’s formal education was sporadic. Her parents’ library furnished her with a wide range of books, which she read avidly. These included popular novels, ancient classics and canonical French texts by authors such as Diderot, Proust and Stendhal. She has identified these as key influences on her own writing, laying greater public claim to their literary kinship to that of contemporary Francophone writers. She was particularly fascinated by Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme, which became a distorting lens through which she tried to envision a Europe that was exotic in its remoteness from the isolated parts of Asia she inhabited. Perversely when she returned to Europe it could not live up to the fantasies she had projected onto it, although she now reports feeling more comfortable living in both Brussels and Paris.

1981-1984 Between 13 and 16 Nothomb suffered from anorexia, a condition prompted in part by her desire to hold back puberty, a state that appeared to her as ‘une monstrosité physique’ . Her weight at its lowest was 36 kilos and she suffered hair loss. Paradoxically, however, it was after she lost the childhood body she felt was a ‘perfect’ fit for her, that age 17 she began to develop her voice as an author. She has also stated that she unconsciously took over this role from her admired sister Juliette, who had written previously but stopped when she also suffered anorexia.

Images of grotesque bodies figure largely in Nothomb’s writing and she has admitted freely that her depiction of the maturation of the female body is equivocal and disturbing. She has stated ‘je n’ai jamais regretté d’un quart de seconde d’être une femme’ . Yet she also famously declared ‘Prétextat Tach, c’est moi’, thus identifying herself with the protagonist of Hygiène de l’assassin who strangles his cousin Leopoldine to prevent her becoming a woman. However Nothomb contests the drawing of easy parallels between the depiction of violence in texts and its real-life equivalent. She has argued that the excessive, almost comedic violence of parts of her novels offers a relief from the potentially unassimilable horror of real-life suffering, while leaving space to think through actual conflicts. Given her large teenage readership this approach seems to resonate with a generation troubled increasingly by body dysmorphia. Nevertheless, some feminist critics have remained less convinced by her apologetics and have criticized her texts’ lack of explicit condemnation of the conflation of the womanly and the grotesque, which can also inform real acts of violence against women.

1984/5* At 17 Nothomb started a course in the philology of Romance languages at Brussels’ autonomous university. However she tended to feel alienated by the apparent conformism of Belgian society. She cites Nietzsche as a key influence at that time.

In 1988 Nothomb returned to Japan to seek work as a translator. She fell in love and became engaged to a Japanese man, although ultimately she did not marry him. Employment in a hierarchical Japanese company proved stressful, an experience that informed Stupeur y tremblements. She went back to Europe and started work in earnest on Hygiène de l’assassin.

As noted, Nothomb has written since her late teens. She has stressed frequently how important the act of writing is to her and claims to retain many unpublished manuscripts. Hygiène de l’assassin was her first published novel, issued in 1992 by Albin Michel.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s she has published prolifically. A bibliography of her major works is included below. Her writing has been translated into up to 30 languages, with some texts also being adapted for film, theatre and opera. Her books feature regularly in French bestseller lists.
Several have also gained literary prizes including the Grand Prix de l’Academie Française:

1992 Hygiène de l’assassin won the Prix Alan Fournier and the Prix René Fallet.
1995 Les Catilinaires was awarded the Prix Pas Première and the Prix du Jury Jean-Giono
1999 Le Sabotage amoureux won the Prix de la Vocation and the Prix Chardonne.
1999 Stupeur y tremblements gained the Grand Prix de l’Academie Française and the newly instituted Prix Internet du Livre. Nothomb became the first author to win this second award.

Hygiène de l’assassin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1992).

Le Sabotage amoureux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993).

Les Combustibles (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994).

Les Catilinaires (Paris: Albin Michel 1995).

Péplum (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996).

Attentat (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997).

Mercure (Paris: Albin Michel 1998).

Stupeur et tremblements (Paris: Albin Michel 1999).

Métaphysique des tubes (Paris: Albin Michel 2000).

Cosmétique de l’ennemi (Paris: Albin Michel 2001).

Robert des noms propres (Paris: Albin Michel 2002).

Antéchrista (Paris: Albin Michel 2003).

The Stranger Next Door (Les Catilinaires), trans. Carol Volk (New York:
Henry Holt and Co., 1998).

Loving Sabotage (Le Sabotage amoureux), trans. Andrew Wilson (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).

Fear and Trembling (Stupeur y tremblements), trans. Adriana Hunter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

The Character of Rain (Métaphysique des tubes), trans. Timothy Bent (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

Ahmad, Nusrat, 'Amélie Nothomb et le surrealismo bruxellois' in Railissimo; magazine de la SNCB, 1999

Amanieux, Laureline, 'Un entretien avec Amélie Nothomb' (27 avril 2001) Available online at <http://www.membres.lycos.fr/fenrir/nothomb.htm> Accessed 22 October 2003.

Berto, Michel, Interview in Bruxelles, ma région, 2 Available online at <http://www.bruxelles-maregion.com> ??

Bourton, William, 'Amélie chez les doux-dingues; Le Soir, 14 March 1998.

Corinne Le Brun, 'Amélie, Madame pipi des Nippons', Le Soir illustré Available online at <http://www.lycos.fr/fenrir/nothomb.htm> Accessed 20 October 2003.

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