author
Tereska Torres
A French Resistance veteran whose wartime experiences inspired the groundbreaking 1950 novel Women’s Barracks. Tereska Torrès wrote candidly about women’s lives in uniform, creating a book that became both a major bestseller and an early landmark of lesbian pulp fiction.
1 Audiobook
Women's barracks
by Tereska Torres
About the author
Born in Paris in 1920, Tereska Torrès fled France after the German invasion and joined the Free French Forces in London, where she served in the women’s corps and worked at Charles de Gaulle’s headquarters. Her experiences during the war later became the foundation for her best-known book, Women’s Barracks.
Published in the United States in 1950, Women’s Barracks became one of the first paperback-original bestsellers and sold millions of copies. Torrès was surprised by its reputation as lesbian fiction and preferred to describe it as a serious account of how wartime conditions affected relationships and social conventions. She went on to write more than a dozen books, including memoirs drawn from her wartime and postwar experiences, before her death in Paris in 2012.