Baroness Fabienne-Claire Nothomb (French: ), better known by her pen name Amélie Nothomb, is a Belgian Francophone novelist. Part of her childhood was spent in Asia. A prolific author, since the publication of her first novel Hygiene and the Assassin in 1992, at the age of twenty six, she publishes a book a year. Her novels are among the top literary sales and have been translated into several languages, which earned her the title of Commander of the Order of the Crown and the title of Baroness bestowed upon her by King Philippe of Belgium. Her novel Fear and Trembling won the Grand Prize of the novel from the French Academy in 1999, and in 2015, she was elected member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature in Belgium.
Amélie Nothomb was born in Etterbeek, Belgium on 9 July 1966, to Belgian diplomat Patrick Nothomb, She lived in Japan from the age of two until she was five years old. Subsequently, she lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma, the United Kingdom (Coventry) and Laos. She is from an old noble Belgian political family and is the grandniece of Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, a Belgian foreign minister (1980–1981), and great granddaughter of writer and politician Pierre Nothomb. She has one brother and one sister, Juliette Nothomb.