Zhoel Dikker

Joël Dicker is a contemporary Swiss writer who writes in French. He specializes in the thriller novel genre.

Joël was born on June 16, 1985, in Geneva, Switzerland. He received his school education in his hometown. At 19, he enrolled in the drama course at Cours Florent in Paris. A year later, he returned to Switzerland to enter law school, where he later earned a master’s degree at the University of Geneva in 2010.

Joël’s interest in literature emerged quite early: at the age of 10, he and a friend founded the “Newspaper of Animals,” which he ran for seven years. Thanks to articles about animal life, Dicker received the Cuneo Prize and the title of “the youngest editor-in-chief in Switzerland.” In 2005, Joël published his first work, “The Tiger,” which was awarded the International Young Authors Prize. In 2010, Dicker won the Geneva Writers’ Prize, a prestigious award for unpublished manuscripts. Later, Parisian editor Bernard de Fallois acquired Dicker’s manuscript “The Last Days of Our Fathers,” which he published in early 2012. Six months later, he published one of his best-known works, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. The book was so successful that at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2012, the rights to it were acquired by many publishers from other countries. In the end, the novel was translated into 32 languages.

In addition to literature, Joël Dicker is involved in business: “Together with a friend, I bought a chocolate factory… one of the oldest, if not the oldest, chocolate factory in Geneva, founded in 1875… The chocolate factory was in difficulty, and that moved us. We told ourselves that in our time, when the economy is in crisis, in the era of online shopping, when many stores are closing, we could take over this chocolate factory to prevent it from going bankrupt.”

Dicker is married and has one child.