Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on 4 April 1914, in Gia Định,[1] Cochinchina, French Indochina (now Vietnam).

Her parents, Marie (née Legrand, 1877–1956) and Henri Donnadieu (1872–1921), were teachers from France who likely had met at Gia Định High School.

They then moved back to French Indochina when she was posted to Phnom Penh followed by Vĩnh Long and Sa Đéc.

The family struggled financially, and her mother made a bad investment in an isolated property and area of rice farmland in Prey Nob,[2] a story which was fictionalized in Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall).

In 1931, when she was 17, Duras and her family moved to France where she successfully passed the first part of the baccalaureate with the choice of Vietnamese as a foreign language, as she spoke it fluently.

She continued her education, earning a diplôme d'études supérieures (DES) in public law and, later, in political economy.

[2] During World War II, from 1942 to 1944, Duras worked for the Vichy government in an office that allocated paper quotas to publishers and in the process operated a de facto book-censorship system.

Seven Nights; Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964); and her play India Song, which Duras herself later directed as a film in 1975.

[8] Duras's early novels were fairly conventional in form, and were criticized for their "romanticism" by fellow writer Raymond Queneau; however, with Moderato Cantabile, she became more experimental, paring down her texts to give ever-increasing importance to what was not said.

Believing that fidelity was an absurd notion, Duras began an affair with writer Dionys Mascolo while still married to Antelme, creating a ménage à trois.

Her friend, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, once remarked, "Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me," in praise of her novel Le Ravissement de Lol V.

He sent the result under the alias "Guillaume P. Jacquet" to the three main publishers of Duras: Gallimard, POL and Éditions de Minuit.

Éditions de Minuit replied to Guillaume P. Jacquet that "[his] manuscript unfortunately cannot be included in [their] publications"; Gallimard that "the verdict is not favourable"; and POL that "[the] book does not correspond to what [they] are looking for their collections".