Biography
Henri-Pierre Roché is the author of two novels who have both been adapted to the cinema by François Truffaut: Jules et Jim (1953) and Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (1956). He was deeply involved with the artistic avant-garde in Paris and the Dada movement.
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Henri-Pierre Roché, Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (Gallimard, April 1956) |
Writer and filmmaker, Atiq Rahimi was born in Kabul. When the soviets invaded Afghanistan he left the country and sought refuge in France, where he settled and did a PhD in Cinema at the Sorbonne. Atiq Rahimi presented his first literary project in 2000, Terre et Cendres (Earth and Ashes), which was published by P.O.L. and was an immediate hit in Europe and South America. Based on that novel, he directed the film with the same title, winning a total of 25 awards in various cinema festivals, in particular the Prix du Regard vers l’Avenir at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2004. In 2002, following the fall of the Taliban regime, Rahimi returned to Afghanistan after eighteen years of exile and photographed the city of Kabul. Six of those pictures were purchased by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His novel, Syngué Sabour (The Patience Stone, in Polly McLean’s translation) is the first one to be written directly in French, and was awarded the 2008 Goncourt prize. According to the author, choosing French instead of his mother tongue was a way to escape the “involuntary self-censorship” he feels when writing in Persian. His work is published in English by Penguin, with the support of English PEN.
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Atiq Rahimi, The Patience Stone, translated by Polly McLean (Vintage, January 2011) |
Marcel Proust was born in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil on July 10, 1871. He began to work on In Search of Lost Time sometime around 1908, and the first volume, Swann’s Way, was published in 1913. In 1919 the second volume, Within a Budding Grove, won the Goncourt Prize, bringing Proust great and instantaneous fame. Two subsequent installments—The Guermantes Way (1920–21) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1921)—appeared in his lifetime. The remaining volumes were published after his death: The Captive in 1923, The Fugitive in 1925, and Time Regained in 1927.
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Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Volume 1: The Way by Swann’s, translated by Lydia Davis, edited by Christopher Prendergast (Penguin, October 2003) |
Christopher Prendergast is Professor Emeritus in French literature at the university of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy and King’s College Cambridge, specialised in the 19th and 20th centuries. He edited the Penguin translation of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (2003, translated by Lydia Davis).
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Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Volume 1: The Way by Swann’s, translated by Lydia Davis, edited by Christopher Prendergast (Penguin, October 2003) |
Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens was a renowned publisher of a great number of prestigious French authors. He began his career in 1969 as an intern at the publishing house Christian Bourgeois and then became a reader for Flammarion. In 1977, he created his own collection at Hachette, giving it his initials (P.O.L) as an acronym. He was admired and appreciated by the authors he discovered, amongst which feature Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, Leslie Kaplan, Richard Millet, Marie Darrieussecq or Emmanuel Carrère. In 2003, he gave a definition of his editorial principles to the weekly Le Monde des Livres: “One must show, through editorial work, that literature is multiple, contradictory and alive. But what links all writers is their preoccupation with language, this material they try to shape.”
Cormac Newark studied music at the University of Oxford, King’s College London, and at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. He later was a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Cormac works mainly on nineteenth-century French and Italian opera and literature. His book, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (which naturally includes a chapter on Le Fantôme de l’Opéra), was published in 2011, and his essays have appeared in 19th-Century Music, the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and various edited collections. He has also written for Opera magazine and The Guardian.
Daniel Medin is an editor and a Professor at the American University of Paris (AUP), where he teaches classes on contemporary world literature and editorial practice. His research is principally concerned with modern fiction from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with an emphasis on the work and global reception of Franz Kafka. He is Associate Director of AUP’s Center for Writers and Translators, and one of the editors of its Cahiers Series. He is co-editor of Music & Literature magazine, edits The White Review’s annual translation issue and was a judge for the Best Translated Book Award in 2014 and 2015, and for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015.
Eimear McBride trained at Drama Centre London. Her debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing received a number of awards including the Goldsmiths Prize, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and Irish Novel of the Year. She occasionally writes and reviews for the Guardian, TLS and the New Statesman. She is published by Faber in the UK, and translated by Georgina Tacou for Buchet / Chastel in France.
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Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians (Faber&Faber, September 2016) |
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Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press, June 2013) |
Paul Mason is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and film-maker. Previously economics editor of Channel 4 News, his books include Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: the New Global Revolutions; Live Working Die Fighting; and Rare Earth: A Novel. He won the Wincott Prize for Business Journalism in 2003 and was elected Workworld Broadcaster of the Year in 2004.
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Paul Mason, Postcapitalism. A Guide to Our Future (Allen Lane, June 2016) |
Gaston Leroux’s first novel was serialised in the late 1890s, and with the 1907 publication of The Mystery of the Yellow Room he launched his career as a pioneer of the French detective novel. The Phantom of the Opera (1910) has been Leroux's best-known novel in the English-speaking world ever since the resounding success of the 1925 silent film version. It was translated by Mireille Ribière for Penguin.
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Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera, translated by Mireille Ribière (Penguin Classics, April 2012) |
