Irène Némirovsky was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin who was born in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France, and wrote in French, but was denied French nationality. Arrested as a Jew under the racial laws—which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism—she was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 39. Némirovsky is best known for the posthumously published Suite française.

Némirovsky was born into a successful banking family. Trapped in Moscow by the Russian Revolution, she and her family fled first to a village in Finland, and eventually to France, where she attended the Sorbonne. She achieved early success as a writer: her first novel, David Golder, published when she was twenty-six, was a sensation. By 1937, she had published nine further books, and David Golder had been made into a film; she and her husband Michel Epstein, a bank executive, moved in fashionable social circles.

When the Germans occupied France in 1940, she moved with her husband and two small daughters, aged 5 and 13, from Paris to the comparative safety of Issy-L’Evêque. It was there that she secretly began her writing.