Édouard Louis: ‘I want to be a writer of violence. The more you talk about it, the more you can undo it’

His debut about his violent childhood was an international sensation.

Now the French author has written a novel about being brutally assaulted

• Angelique Chrisafis
• The Guardian

In the lonely, shell-shocked days after Édouard Louis was raped and almost killed in his Paris flat in 2012 – as he sat through tense interviews with police officers or scrubbed his home to get rid of his attacker’s smell – he felt the urgent need to write about it.

“I had told the police my story,” says the now 25-year-old author of three novels who has been hailed as one of the most important literary voices of his generation.

“But when I…

• Édouard Louis: ‘I…