Lola Lafon is a French writer, composer, feminist and libertarian. With a French, Russian and Polish background, was raised in the equally diverse cities of Bucharest, Sofia and Paris. Her first love was dance, but then she turned to writing. After publishing a few articles in fanzines and alternative reviews/journals, she was spotted by literary reviews: N.R.V (which means “angry” in French), among others, published Lola Lafon’s first short stories between 1998 and 2000.

Her latest novel, The Little Communist Who Never Smiled (Seven Stories Press, 2016), is an award-winning novel that powerfully re-imagines a childhood in the spotlight of history, politics, and destiny. Montreal 1976. A fourteen-year-old girl steps out onto the floor of the Montreal Forum and into history. Twenty seconds on uneven bars is all it takes for Nadia Comaneci, the slight, unsmiling child from Communist Romania, to etch herself into the collective memory. The electronic scoreboard, astonishing spectators with what has happened, shows 1.0. The judges have awarded an unprecedented perfect ten, the first in Olympic gymnastics, though the scoreboard is unable to register anything higher than 9.9. In The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, Lola Lafon tells the story of Comaneci's journey from growing up in rural Romania to her eventual defection to the United States in 1989. Adored by young girls in the west and appropriated as a political emblem by the Ceausescu regime, Comaneci's life was scrutinized wherever she went. Lafon's fictionalized account shows how a single athletic event mesmerizes the world and reverberates across nations.

Music is also an important part of this versatile artist’s life. For each of her novels’ releases, Lola Lafon organizes a series of concert-readings tours. The concert-readings event created for The Little Communist who Never Smiled was held in Bucharest and Timisoara before the novel’s world debut, as an initiative of l’Institut Français. Once released in Paris, the novel was featured in more musical literary events at La Maison de la Poésie and several spring festivals.

Partners: Consulate General of France in Toronto, EUNIC, as part of the International Festival of Authors (IFOA).