Archives: Bio

Claire-Louise Bennett’s short fiction and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Penny Dreadful, The Moth, Colony, The Irish Times, The White Review and Gorse. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013 and has received bursaries from the Arts Council Ireland and Galway City Council. Pond is her first collection of stories and was published by Fitzcarraldo in English, and by Editions de l’Olivier in a French translation by Thierry Decottignies.

fitzcarraldoeditions.com/authors/claire-louise-bennett
http://www.editionsdelolivier.fr/auteurs/27808-claire-louise-bennett

Related / Latest Publication:

Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond (Fitzcarraldo, October 2015)

Roland Barthes studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Romania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. His writings helped establish structuralism and the New Criticism as leading intellectual movements. By the late 1970s, his theories had become extremely influential not only in France but throughout Europe and in the United States. Other leading radical French thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him include the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, socio-historian Michel Foucault, and philosopher Jacques Derrida. Barthes was a professor at the College de France until his death in 1980.

Related / Latest Publication:

Tiphaine Samoyault, Barthes. A Biography, translated by Andrew Brown (Polity Press, January 2017)

Pénélope Bagieu is a bestselling graphic novel author and her editorial illustrations have appeared all over the French media. In the UK, her graphic novels include Exquisite Corpse and California Dreamin', selected for the Prix Artémisia and finalist of the Fnac BD Prize in 2016. Her last book, Les Culottées : Des Femmes qui ne font que ce qu’elles veulent, was published this year as Brazen: Rebel Ladies who Rocked the World by Ebury Press in a translation by Montana Kane. Pénélope Bagieu blogs, plays drums in a rock band, and watches lots of nature shows.

Ebury: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/penelope-bagieu/1082671/
Gallimard: http://www.gallimard-bd.fr/auteur-75847-bagieu.html

Related / Latest Publications:

	Pénélope Bagieu, Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked The World, translated by Montana Kane (Ebury, March 2018)
	Pénélope Bagieu, California Dreamin' (First Second, March 2017)

Véronique Aubouy is a French filmmaker and an artist. Her works are strongly influenced by literature and music, and she blends documentaries, fictions, but also performances and video and photo installations. Since October 1993, Véronique Aubouy has been collecting live readings of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which she describes as a tremendous influence for her. The readings are filmed page after page, in the place and setting that they choose. To date, the resulting film Proust Lu is 126 hours long. She has performed her unique hour-long summary of Proust’s oeuvre in a number of places including Paris, New York and Los Angeles.

Related / Latest Publications:

	Véronique Aubouy, Mathieu Riboulet, A la lecture (Grasset, September 2014)
	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)

Mitchell Abidor is an American writer, editor and translator working with French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Esperanto. Amongst a number of works, he is the translator of Jean Jaures's A Socialist History of the French Revolution (Pluto, 2015), and the author of May Made Me (Pluto, 2018) in which he collects oral testimonies from the creative, violent and ground-shaking events which took place in France in May 1968.

Pluto Books: https://www.plutobooks.com/author/mitchell-abidor/

Related / Latest Publication:

Mitchell Abidor, May Made Me (Pluto, May 2018)

An award-winning journalist, Boyd Tonkin currently writes for newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Economist and The Spectator. Previously, he was Literary Editor and then Senior Writer at The Independent. In 2001, he re-founded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for literature in translation, and in 2016 chaired the first Man Booker International Prize after it became a prize for translated fiction. He is now Special Adviser to the prize, and has also judged the Booker Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the David Cohen Prize. His reader’s guide to global non-anglophone fiction, 100 Best Novels In Translation, is forthcoming in June 2018 with Galileo.

Sophie Lewis has been translating from French since 2005 and from Portuguese since 2012. She has translated works by Stendhal, Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Noémi Lefebvre and João Gilberto Noll, among others. Her translation of Noémi Lefebvre’s Blue Self-Portrait, published by Les Fugitives, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2018. She is also a literary editor, most recently Senior Editor at And Other Stories press. In 2016 she launched Shadow Heroes, a series of workshops introducing aspects of translation to GCSE-level students.

Related / Latest Publication:

Noémi Lefebvre, Blue Self-Portrait, translated by Sophie Lewis (Les Fugitives, June 2017)

Born and raised in Paris, Christian Michel spent part of his professional life in the corporate world, with long stints in Geneva and Moscow. Mercantile activities didn't dim his interest in philosophy. He started writing articles on the meaning of economics, what it does to human beings and societies, eventually lecturing on the subject after moving to London. Christian has been organising the café philo at the Institut français for 9 years.

Frank Wynne worked as a bookseller in Paris before moving to London, where he translated and published comics and graphic novels. He has translated works by, among others, Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Ahmadou Kourouma, Boualem Sansal, Claude Lanzmann, Tómas Eloy Martínez and Almudena Grandes. His work has earned him a number of awards, including the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán. His translation of The Impostor by Javier Cercas (from the Spanish) was longlisted this year for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, and Vernon Subutex by Virginie Despentes, which he translated from the French, is shortlisted for the Prize.

Related / Latest Publications:

	Pierre Lemaître, The Great Swindle, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press, November 2016)
	Virginie Despentes, Vernon Subutex 1, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press, June 2017)

Delphine de Vigan is the author of bestselling Based on a True Story, which was adapted in 2017 for the screen by Roman Polanski and Olivier Assayas. Translated by George Miller, her books are published in the UK by Bloomsbury and in France by JC Lattès. Her previous novel, Nothing Holds Back the Night won the Prix FNAC and the Grand Prix des Lectrices de ELLE. No and Me (2010) was a bestseller in France and was awarded the Prix des Libraires, translated into twenty languages and adapted into a movie. In Britain it was a Richard & Judy selection and has sold over 70,000 copies. Underground Time was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize in 2009.

Related / Latest Publication:

Delphine de Vigan, Based on a True Story, translated by George Miller (Bloomsbury, September 2017)