Elsa Gille

Élisabeth Gille was a French translator and writer, born in Paris in 1937. She was the younger daughter of novelist Irène Némirovsky and Michel Epstein, and her life was deeply marked by the Second World War and the murder of her parents at Auschwitz.

She is best known for Le Mirador (1992), an imaginative biography of her mother written in a first-person voice. Sources also describe her as the author of other books shaped by memory, illness, and childhood survival during the German occupation, and note that she worked as a leading editor at the French publishing house Denoël.

Her work is often remembered for the way it blends biography, fiction, and testimony. Even in a brief body of writing, she left a strong impression as an author who found humane, inventive ways to write about family, trauma, and remembrance.