Lola Lafon: When You Listen to this Song – Book Presentation

Award-winning French author Lola Lafon visits the U.S. to celebrate the release of When You Listen to This Song (translated by Lauren Elkin, Yale University Press, 2025) and will be in conversation with professor Maxime Foerster. In this haunting and luminous work, Lafon recounts a night spent alone in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Annex where Anne Frank and her family hid during the Nazi occupation. Immersed in this charged space, Lafon confronts the echoes of confinement and survival, inviting readers to reconsider Anne Frank not as a distant icon, but as a passionate young woman and a disciplined writer shaping her voice amid terror.

Through intimate reflection and lyrical prose, Lafon interlaces Anne Frank’s story with her own—tracing the silences and losses that mark her family’s history during the Holocaust and her childhood friend’s death under the Khmer Rouge. The result is a deeply personal meditation on memory, grief, and the transformative power of writing.

When You Listen to This Song, a literary and critical success in France, asks what it means to bear witness, to write in the face of loss, and to find light within history’s darkest rooms.

About the author: Lola Lafon is a French novelist, musician, and activist. Her acclaimed works include The Little Communist Who Never Smiled and Reeling.

Maxime Foerster was born and raised in Toulouse, France. He is an Associate Professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies at Southern Methodist University.