Laurence Bougault, born in 1970, was a French writer and academic. She was also well known as a long-distance adventurer on horseback. She studied literature in Lyon in preparation for university studies in Paris. Certified in Modern Letters in 1992, she defended her Ph.D. dissertation in French literature at the University of Sorbonne. Paris. Appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Rennes, she moved to Brittany. She then began directing research at the Sorbonne. Bougault regularly published poems and essays on literary criticism and French stylistics as well as educational works. She also wrote and published newsletters, poetry, essays and short stories. She received the Discovery Grant in 2002 from the country's Centre National du Livre to continue her research. As a young girl, Bougault began horseback riding and became passionate about the equestrian world. She engaged in long distance trips on horseback beginning in 1997 with a trip to Mongolia. For her first long-distance endurance trip in 2001, she crossed southeast Africa from Lesotho through South Africa to Malawi a distance of 2,100 miles in eight months. That trip resulted in a written account of the adventure: Under the Eye of African Horses, published in French by Belin in 2003. Bougault then began breeding a rare equine, the Akhi-Teke, a Turkmen racehorse valued for its endurance, intelligence, and the sheen of its coat. In 2009, she made a second long-distance trip on an Akhal-Teke from Iran, westward to Turkey and Greece and on to Paris, a trip of 4,000 miles in less than six months. Laurence Bougault died at the age of 48 in 2018.