The 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French Catholic writer François Mauriac (1885–1970) "for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life." He is the eight French author to receive the prize after the novelist André Gide in 1947.

François Charles Mauriac was a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist, a member of the Académie française, and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1952). He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958. He was a life-long Catholic.