Sciences Po: A work of literature

1,500-2,000 characters including spaces (about 250-350 words)

Please select a work of literature that has contributed to your personal intellectual development. Please develop your answer.

What it’s really asking

They want a book that genuinely changed how you think, and a real explanation of what it did to your mind, not a summary or a review. The choice itself, plus how you handle it, reveals your intellectual seriousness.

Why they ask it

This question separates applicants who read to think from applicants who read to impress. Because the interview can turn straight to your chosen book, it also quietly tests whether your claimed intellectual life is real.

Three ways in

Choose a book you can defend

Pick a work you have actually finished and still argue with, even an unfashionable or popular one, over a prestigious title you only half remember.

Focus on the idea, not the plot

Zero in on the one idea or method in the book that shifted your thinking, not on its story or its reputation.

Show what it opened up

Name a question the book left unresolved for you that you still want to pursue at university.

✕ Weak opening

“One of the most influential books I have ever read is 1984 by George Orwell, a timeless classic.”

✓ Strong opening

“Reading Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time, I realised an interview transcript can be a more honest history than any textbook chapter.”

✦ Annotated example · Camus and the limits of the absurd. Written by EssayLens to teach, not a real applicant’s essay. Tap a highlighted line →

I first read Albert Camus's The Plague expecting an allegory and finished it arguing with a doctor. Rieux, who tends the sick in a quarantined Oran without any promise that his effort means anything cosmically, refused to give me the consolation I wanted. He does not fight the plague because God or History demands it. He fights it because the alternative, doing nothing, is unthinkable to him.¹That distinction unsettled me. I had been raised to believe that good action needed a foundation, a creed or a cause underneath it. Camus proposed instead that meaning could be built sideways, through solidarity, without ever resting on a final justification.²For weeks I could not decide whether that was the bravest idea I had encountered or a quiet evasion. I kept returning to the same page, suspicious of how easily it comforted me.³I took the question outside the novel. Reading about humanitarian workers in conflict zones, I recognised Rieux: people acting decisively while suspending the larger questions of why suffering exists at all. Camus had given me a vocabulary for a political posture I kept seeing in the world, the choice to act competently inside a problem you cannot fully solve.⁴Yet I push back where Camus stops. His solidarity is heroic but oddly solitary; his characters rarely build institutions, only personal resolve. I find myself wanting the next chapter he never writes, the part where revolt becomes structure, where the impulse to help the sick becomes a system that distributes help fairly.⁵That gap is where my own questions now live, and why I read political theory hungrily rather than dutifully. Camus taught me to keep working without certainty. He left me, deliberately I think, to figure out what to build once the working begins.⁶

1Names a specific, non-cliched literary work and immediately stages a disagreement with it. Treating the book as an argument rather than an inspiration signals intellectual engagement over sentiment.
2Shows the book genuinely altering the candidate's thinking by naming the specific belief it challenged, which makes the intellectual stakes legible.
3Admits real intellectual ambivalence. The honest uncertainty is more persuasive than a tidy lesson learned, and the suspicion of one's own comfort shows critical self-awareness.
4Extends the literary idea into the political and real-world domain, showing the candidate reads literature as a lens on society. This bridges naturally toward a social-sciences institution.
5A genuine critique of the chosen text, not just praise. Identifying what the book lacks (institutions, structure) is sophisticated and quietly previews the candidate's intellectual direction.
6Closes by converting the critique into a forward-looking intellectual stance. The final line is restrained and earns its weight without overstatement, matching Sciences Po's preference for precision over drama.

Stuck? Start here

Which book do you still find yourself arguing with months after finishing it, and why?
What specific method or idea in that book changed how you read everything afterwards?
What unresolved question did it leave you with that you would actually want to study further?

Before you submit

Have you avoided summarising the plot and instead explained what the book did to your thinking?
Could you talk about this book for five minutes in an interview without notes?
Does your answer end on a forward-looking question rather than generic praise?

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