With four short films and three novels already to her name, the English language release of Dreams From the Endz sees her sparkly eyed and wide-smiled with wonder. Her first novel, Just Like Tomorrow, has been translated into 22 languages, bearing witness to how situations of cultural confusion and urban segregation occur across the world’s metropolises. How a humorous hubbub of characters that have long seemed closed off and cordoned in by the grey tower blocks they inhabit, can cross borders to infiltrate the literary establishment. 

Now her audience stretches far beyond the social context from which her writing springs, though her favorite fan anecdote remains close to her roots: “I was walking down the street in Pantin [the Northern suburb of Paris where she spent much of her youth],” Guène recalls, “When a young guy runs over to me exclaiming, ‘I know you! I lost my virginity to you! Well, my book virginity. I’d never read a book before Just Like Tomorrow — you were my absolute first!’” 

Guène considers her style to have evolved from her screenwriting training at a community center film workshop aimed at encouraging creativity amongst high school students, otherwise under-nourished by inspiring cultural stimulus. The short films she created pre-empt the settings and social stakes of her writing. Réduction du Temps de Travail explores the divide between parents and children when the younger generation dabble in illicit business to overstep their mothers’ toiling on minimum wage. It’s a DIY, pre-Wire insight into the problems of a slippery withdrawal from education, featuring Guène’s own mother and peers. Mémoire du 17 Octobre 1961 attempts to piece together a testimony of the massacre of Algerian liberation supporters in Paris. Amongst the survivors of this demonstration, was Guène’s father. “I was sixteen when he finally recounted the events to me. I was shocked - how close to home they were, and yet how long this had remained unspoken,” Guène says. Such a documentary, reconstructing a narrative that is still excluded from the schoolbooks of French patrimony, announces a politicized spirit. Yet when it comes to fiction, Guène insists that entertainment must come before message making. 

Guène wants to be more than a brave beurette scribbler. Peppering her phrases with street slang and humor, she reaches readers from ground level to concrete heights — a success that stretches far beyond the catchment area of her estate. Her tales may have infiltrated international publishing establishments — a mark of prestige for some — but Guène does not tread willingly towards intellectual acclaim. She favors an instinctual insight — to explode the idea that literature is purely the domain of the erudite.