Referred to by Voici magazine as "a distant descendant of Dorothy Parker", Anna Gavalda was born in an upper-class suburb of Paris.

She was working as a French teacher in high school when a collection of her short stories were first published in 1999 under the title Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part that met with both critical acclaim and commercial success, selling more than three-quarters of a million copies in her native France and winning the 2000 Grand prix RTL-Lire.

Inspired by the failure of her own marriage, it too was a major literary success and a bestseller and was followed by the short (96 pages) young adult novel 35 kilos d'espoir (95 Pounds of Hope) that she said she wrote "to pay tribute to those of my students who were dunces in school but otherwise fantastic people".

[3] The adaptation of her first novel, Je l'aimais, with Daniel Auteuil and Marie-Josée Croze, was filmed in 2009 by Zabou Breitman.

[5] In March 2018, Anna Gavalda appeared in the African media as one of the finalists of the Grand Prix of Literary Associations 2017.