Biography
Mithu Sanyal is an award-winning broadcaster, academic and author. Her first book, Vulva, was translated into five languages and her book Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo has just been published in English by Verso.
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Mithu Sanyal, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (Verso Books, 2019) |
After studying history of art, archaeology and philosophy at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University of London), Laura Hugo worked in publishing, notably with Pushkin Press specialising in English translations of classic and contemporary literary works. She is currently the director of the Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco. She has co-authored with Marie and Jean-Baptiste Hugo Hauteville House: Victor Hugo décorateur (Paris-Musées, 2016). She lives in Paris.
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Jean-Baptiste Hugo, Marie Hugo et Laura Hugo, Hauteville House : Victor Hugo décorateur (Editions Paris Musées, 2016) |
Agnès Poirier is a Paris-born and London-educated journalist, writer, critic and broadcaster. She is the author of four essays about the different ways in which France and Britain do things and view the world, one of the many topics she regularly discusses on the BBC and CNN and writes about in, among others, The Guardian and The New York Times. She has also taught at Sciences-Po in Paris, and pre-selects British films for the Cannes Film Festival. Her latest book, Left Bank, Art, passion and the rebirth of Paris (1940-1950) was recently published (Bloomsbury, 2018) to great critical acclaim (The Times and The Daily Telegraph‘s Best Books of 2018). It unpools the stories of the philosophers and artists who mingled together in the fashionable left bank during the 1940s and 1950s, striving to explore the human reality behind the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, and many others. From anticonformist lifestyles and existentialist philosophy to jazz and political struggles, the book is packed with anecdotes about the brilliant Parisian life of the era.
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Agnès Poirier, Left Bank, Art, passion and the rebirth of Paris (1940-1950) (Bloomsbury, 2018) |
Cal Revely-Calder is on the arts desk at the Telegraph. He is a past winner of the Frieze Writers' Prize and the Guardian Student Critic of the Year award. He is working on a book about art and confusion.
Euan Cameron was born in London, brought up in Argentina, and educated in Britain and France. After a long career as a publisher, he went on to earn his living as a book reviewer and literary journalist before returning to book publishing part-time as an editor at Harvill and Random House. He has translated over thirty books from French including works by Julien Green, Philippe Claudel, Patrick Modiano and Paul Morand, and major biographies of Marcel Proust and Irène Némirovsky. His debut novel, Madeleine, is to be published in June 2019
He was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011. He lives in London.
© Sophie Davidson
Sarah Moss is a Professor at the University of Warwick. Ghost Wall is her sixth novel, after The Tidal Zone translated into French by Laure Manceau as Après la fin (Actes Sud). She has been shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize three times & the RSL Ondaatje prize once. She has written for the Guardian, New Statesman, Independent and BBC Radio and has been a reviewer on Radio 4’s Saturday Review. She lives in Coventry.
© Raindance Festival 2019
Kate Muir is a novelist and a critic. She worked with the Ealing Guardian, The Times (for which she was posted in New York, Paris and Washington). In 2010, she became the chief film critic of The Times, during which time she campaigned for Women and Hollywood, an association advocating for equality and diversity in the film industry. She has also been a spokesperson for Time's Up UK and Birds' Eye View, which promotes the distribution of female-led films.
She has written three novels so far: West Coast, Left Bank and Suffragette City, as well as two non-fiction books, including Arms and the Woman, an exploration of the battle for female equality in the military.
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/kate-muir/
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Kate Muir, Arms and the Woman (Teach Yourself) (Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd 1992) |
Ruth Diver was head of Comparative Literature at the University of Auckland until 2014. She is the author of Écrivains Russes, Enfants Français (Honoré Champion, 2013) and has published research on translingual literature. A bilingual translator French/English, she also translates from German and Russian. She won two 2018 French Voices Awards for her translations of Marx and the Doll by Maryam Madjidi, and Titus Did Not Love Berenice by Nathalie Azoulai. She also won Asymptote’s 2016 Close Approximations fiction prize for her translation of extracts of Maraudes, by Sophie Pujas. Ruth collaborated with Ros Schwarz in the translation of The Reader on the 6.27 by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent (Waterstones Book of the Month, May 2016) for which she translated the Alexandrine verse. She recently translated Adélaïde Bon’s The Little Girl on the Ice Floe.
https://data.bnf.fr/fr/16733871/ruth_diver/
https://www.societyofauthors.org/translator-Profile?itemID=394
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Adélaïde Bon, The Little Girl on the Ice Floe (Quercus Books, 2019) |
Patrick McGuinness’ has been a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College since 1998. His main research interests include 19th and 20th century French literature, especially Poetry and Theatre; Anglo-American Modernism and modern poetry in English. He has writtten three colections of poems, The Canals of Mars, 19th Century Blues, Jilted City, and a novel, The Last Hundred Days, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and won the Writers’ Guild Prize for Fiction and the Wales Book of the Year. In French it won the Prix du premier roman étranger 2013. His memoir, Other People’s Countries: A Journey into Memory (Cape 2014) won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black and the PEN Ackerley Prize. It appears as Vide-grenier in French from Grasset.
https://www.grasset.fr/patrick-mcguinness
https://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/people/patrick-mcguinness
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Patrick McGuinness, Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France: From Anarchism to Action française (Oxford University Press, 2019) |
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.
