Julia Kristeva

Born in Bulgaria in 1941, Julia Kristeva emigrated to Paris in 1965. There she joined the structuralist group Tel Quel and became one of its leading theoretical voices. Her first book, *La révolution du langage poétique*, an examination of symbolic structures, brought her international recognition. From 1974, she held a chair at the University of Paris VII. In 1979, she also embarked on a career as a psychoanalyst in the Lacanian tradition. As a linguist, literary theorist, and psychoanalyst, she published influential works on language, literature, and psychoanalysis, including *Strangers to Ourselves*. She received the Holberg Prize in 2004 and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2006.