Louisa Yousfi
From 15 June to 13 July 2026

The French journalist and literary critic Louisa Yousfi was born in 1988. She is the author of Rester barbare (La fabrique, 2022), a book-length essay in which she borrows the barbarian motif from the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine (“I’m better off not being too cultivated. I have to retain a certain barbarianism”) and offers readers a narrative about the Blacks and Arabs of France (re)turning to their inner barbarian. The work is both political and literary. Translated by Andy Bliss, In Defence of Barbarism: Non-Whites Against the Empire was published by Verso Books in 2025. Yousfi also had a hand in a collective writing project called Contre la littérature politique (with Pierre Alferi, Nathalie Quintane, Leslie Kaplan, Tanguy Viel, Antoine Volodine, La fabrique, 2024). Her latest book is La grande méthode (La fabrique, 2026).