Sophie Buchaillard

Novelist, poet and essayist

I write across fiction, poetry and critical essays, exploring how language shapes belonging, how memory travels between generations, and what it means to tell another person’s story.

Based in South Wales, my work moves between personal experience and wider histories, asking questions about identity, migration and the stories through which we understand one another.

Explore the books - Find my essays - Speaking & events

Welcome to my website

In Books, you will find my two novels, This Is Not Who We Are and Assimilation; and my poetry collection, Painting over the cracks. Head there to read about the books, find out what reviewers said, and where you can purchase your copy.

In Writing, you will find a list of my creative essays, collection contributions and some of the critical reviews I published in magazines and newspapers.

In Speaking, you can find out about my past public interventions at festivals, academic conferences, bookshops; and sometimes in a field. Watch me at Hay Festival After Hours and listen to me talk to poet and academic Jane Laugharne. If you are organising an event and looking for a public speaker, chair panel, facilitator or judge for a prize, this is your space.

In About, I tell you a little about myself, my writing process. There you can find some practical info, including a downloadable event bio, CV and a critical review of my body of work.

If you can’t find what you are looking for, then get in touch here.

  • This is Not Who we Are – This is a powerfully empathetic and sensitive book, which reserves its real rage for the ideological fanatics who deliberately mutate anger at oppression into a specious salvationist enterprise, hate-fuelled, directed at other victims of that same oppression.

    Niall Griffiths, author of Broken Ghosts

  • Painting over the cracks - Fizzes with pain, anger and the need to reshape trauma through words. The poems explore changing places, languages, identities. Yet the communality of human experience is often returned to. 'Each a speck/on a line threading us all together.'

    Jane Laugharne, author of Greenscapes and other poems

  • Assimilation – Spanning continents and slipping between time, this sophisticated and affecting novel shows how the secrets of the past never quite disappear, casting long, long shadows over the present day.

    Jon Gower, author of The Turning Tide: A Biography of the Irish Sea

  • This is Not Who We Are – A multi-layered and very moving novel about the Rwandan genocide and the culpability of the French government. The central idea of pen friends whose letter-writing is disrupted by war feels original and offers a fruitful way into this complex subject matter. An excellent debut and I can't wait to see what Sophie Buchaillard writes next.

    Katherine Stansfield, author of The Visitor and The Magpie Tree