Gisèle Pineau
Gisèle Pineau is to be awarded a Doctor of Letters (DLitt) on Tuesday 1 July 2025 during the morning ceremony.
Gisèle Pineau is a French novelist, writer and former psychiatric nurse. Although born in Paris, her origins are Guadeloupean.
She has written several books on the difficulties and torments of her childhood as a Black person growing up in Parisian society.
During her youth, Gisèle divided her time between France and Guadeloupe as a result of her father’s stationing in the military. Gisèle struggled with her identity as a Black immigrant due to the racism and xenophobia she experienced at her all-white school in the Kremlin-Bicêtre suburb. She took to writing in order to console the difficulties of her French upbringing and Caribbean heritage, her works serving to connect the two cultures rather than separate them.
Gisèle is aligned with the créolité literary movement, and in the 1990s was among the most prominent of Guadeloupean créolité-adjacent writers, alongside Ernest Pépin.
In her writings, she uses the oral tradition of storytelling in fictional works to reclaim the narratives of Caribbean culture. She also focuses on racism and the effects it can have on a young girl trying to discover her own cultural identity.
Her book L’Exil Selon Julia highlights this, as she relies on the memories and experiences of her aged grandmother to help her learn about her society’s traditions and her own cultural background. In the book, she also mentions that the discrimination she felt as a child did not only apply to French society in Paris, but also to the people of Guadeloupe, who rejected her for being too cosmopolitan on her return to the land of her ancestors.
She lived in Paris for many years and, whilst maintaining her writing career, has also returned to being a psychiatric nurse to balance out her life. She now lives in Marie Galante, a little French island dependant of Guadeloupe.