Esther Teillard is a French writer and literary journalist from Marseille who studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy and contributed to Artpress and France Culture. She published in 2025, Carnes (Pauvert editions, Prix Sade du premier roman, Prix de La Ponche) and in 2026, Fuck Circus, (Grasset).

Carnes — Pauvert, January 15, 2025

Esther Teillard’s debut novel follows a 17-year-old girl who leaves her native Marseille after being accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts de Cergy, in the Paris region. She enters a new, more female-dominated and ostensibly progressive environment, where the language of inclusivity has replaced the overt misogyny she knew in Marseille.

Yet beneath this new social order, violence and desire persist in different forms. Through a provocative gallery of characters—including young women, sex workers, students, and artists—Carnes examines the contradictions of bourgeois feminism and the ways patriarchal violence survives beneath supposedly virtuous social attitudes.

Teillard has described the novel as the story of a young woman’s moral and sexual awakening: a coming-of-age novel concerned with desire, sexuality, violence, and the construction of identity.

Fuck Circus — Grasset, August 26, 2026

Teillard’s second novel takes the opposite trajectory. One summer evening, a young woman is left by her lover, Gabriel. Reeling from the breakup, she wanders alone through the city of her childhood before entering a bar called Le Mythe, a nocturnal world populated by a film producer, a reality-TV star, a politician, a descendant of Chateaubriand, and other damaged and obsessive figures.

As alcohol, desire, shame, obsession, and violence take over the night, the gathering gradually descends into a hostage situation. Rather than........

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