Laurent Binet

Laurent Binet (born 19 July 1972) is a French writer and university lecturer.

He spent four years singing and playing guitar with a rock band named Stalingrad.

In August 2012, Binet published Rien ne se passe comme prévu (Nothing goes as planned), a behind-the-scenes account of the successful presidential campaign of François Hollande, which Binet witnessed while embedded with Hollande's campaign staff.

In 2015, he published his second novel, La septième fonction du langage, which was translated in 2017 as The Seventh Function of Language, a detective thriller dealing with a fictionalized account of Roland Barthes's death.

The novel was awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 2019 and was published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.