Virginie Despentes (French: [depɑ̃t]; born 13 June 1969) is a French writer, novelist, and filmmaker. Her work is an inventory of youth marginalization; it participates to the sexual revolution lived by Generation X and to the acclimation of pornography in public spaces through new communication techniques. With a transgressive exploration of obscenity's limits, as a novelist or a film-maker she proposes social critique and an antidote to the new moral order. Her characters deal with misery and injustice, self-violence such as drug addiction, or violence towards others such rape or terrorism, violences she also had suffered from. She is one of the most popular French authors from this era.

She was named a member of the Académie Goncourt on January 5, 2016.