Hymn to Life

Gisèle Pelicot was named as the most noteworthy person of 2024 in an opinion poll in France, eclipsing world leaders, and was honoured by Time. To mark International Women’s Day, the Independent named her the most influential woman of 2025.

Her case contributed to the national debate on sexual violence in France, which led to a change in the legal definition of rape.

She has been awarded the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest civic honour.

Natasha Lehrer is a prize-winning writer, translator and editor. Her long form journalism and book reviews have appeared in the Guardian, Observer, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation and Fantastic Man, among others. She has contributed to several books, including a chapter on France in Looking for an Enemy, edited by Jo Glanville. The writers she has translated include Neige Sinno, Nathalie Léger, Chantal Thomas, Vanessa Springora, Amin Maalouf, Victor Segalen, Robert Desnos and Georges Bataille. Her translations have been shortlisted and longlisted for several translation prizes, and she won the 2016 Scott Moncrieff prize for Suite for Barbara Loden.

Ruth Diver is an award-winning literary translator and the former head of comparative literature at the University of Auckland, where she also taught French and Russian. She is the author of Enfant Russes, Écrivains Français, and has published research on translingual authors in Roman 20-50, Europe and Revue des lettres modernes. She won the Asymptote Close Approximations Fiction Prize in 2016 for her translation of Maraudes by Sophie Pujas and has since published over a dozen full-length translations, including The Little Girl on the Ice Floe by Adélaïde Bon (shortlisted for the UK Translators Association Debut Translation Prize) and A History of the Big House by Charif Majdalani (shortlisted for the French-American Translation Prize). Extracts from her translations have appeared in Granta, Tripwire and Guernica. She lives in Aotearoa, New Zealand.