Archives: Bio

Jean-Baptiste Hugo is the son of painter Jean Hugo and a descendant of Victor Hugo. After studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Montpellier and in Marseille, he worked in the publishing business while pursuing an amateur career as a painter and photographer. His keen interest for spirituality led him to seek a deeper understanding in India. His photograph series Primaflora is inspired by Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth and its exploration of the imagery of the first flowers. He took the photographs for the book Hauteville House: Victor Hugo décorateur.

https://www.jeanbaptistehugo.com/biographie

Related / Latest Publication:

Jean-Baptiste Hugo, Marie Hugo et Laura Hugo, Hauteville House : Victor Hugo décorateur (Editions Paris Musées, 2016)

A former student of the École normale supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, an agrégé with a literature PhD, Jean-Marc Hovasse taught at the Charles-de-Gaulle Lille III and Paris-VII universities. He is currently a researcher with the Centre d'Études des Correspondances et Journaux intimes des XIXe et XXe siècles of the CNRS. He has written his thesis and an essay on Victor Hugo and published Victor Hugo: Avant l'exil (1802-1851), in 2001. Alongside Guy Rosa, he co-edited Les Châtiments (GF, 1998), Napoléon le Petit (Actes Sud, 2007), and Histoire d’un crime (La Fabrique, 2009).

https://www.fayard.fr/auteurs/jean-marc-hovasse

Related / Latest Publication:

Jean-Marc Hovasse, Victor Hugo, tome 2 : Pendant l'exil (1851 - 1864) (Fayard, 2008)

Daniel Hahn is a British writer, editor and translator of literary fiction from Portuguese, Spanish and French. He has won several translation prizes (LBF International Excellence Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, etc.), judged the Man Booker International Prize, and chaired or advised many organisations such as the Translators Association, the Society of Authors, the British Centre for Literary Translation. Last year, he created the Translators Association First Translation Prize dedicated to a debut literary translation into English published in the UK.

http://www.danielhahn.co.uk/

Related / Latest Publication:

Daniel Hahn, Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015)

John Freeman is an American writer, poet, and literary critic. He was the editor of the literary magazine Granta until 2013, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in almost 200 English-language publications around the world, including The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. His latest poetry book, Maps, explores the relation between man and his surroundings, and the way in which landscapes influence our experience. Through metaphorical and physical wanderings, it seeks to link the past and the present, establishing a sense of continuity. It was recently translated into French as Vous êtes ici (Actes Sud, 2019) by Pierre Ducrozet.

https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/browse/author.asp?ag={C5C30A26-A01B-4C78-8CF1-031CC55DC6BD}
https://www.actes-sud.fr/node/66865

Related / Latest Publication:

John Freeman, Maps (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)

Elena Ferrante's identity is something of a mystery. She has repeatedly argued that anonymity was a precondition for her work - she has therefore kept her identity secret since the publication of her first novel in 1992. Her best-known work is The Neapolitan Novels, a 4-part series, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions. It includes: My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013, shortlisted for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015, shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize). Two of Ferrante's novels have been adapted into films. Troubling Love (L'amore molesto) became Nasty Love (directed by Mario Martone), while The Days of Abandonment (I giorni dell'abbandono) was adapted by Roberto Faenza. In September 2018, the first two episodes of My Brilliant Friend, an Italian-language miniseries co-produced by American HBO and Italian networks RAI and TIMvision, were aired at the Venice Film Festival and are presented in a UK premiere at Ciné Lumière, as part of Beyond Words Festival.

https://www.europaeditions.com/author/2/elena-ferrante

Related / Latest Publication:

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (Europa Editions, 2018)

Michael Edwards is the only Englishman ever to have been elected to the Académie Française, to which he was inducted in 2014. While holding a chair at the Collège de France (2002-2013), he produced a stream of books in French on Shakespeare and on English poetry more generally, but also on such topics as émerveillement (marvelling) and happiness, in literature, art and music. Prior to that, while being a Professor of English at Warwick, he published three books in English exploring the spiritual aspects of poetry, an aspect he develops further in his recent book, in French, Bible et poésie (2016), on the Christian poetic tradition in England and France, the position of the bilingual poet, and the unspeakable.

http://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/michael-edwards
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=1836

Related / Latest Publication:

Michael Edwards, Bible et poésie (Editions du Fallois, 2016)

Claudia Durastanti is a writer and literary translator based in London. Her critically acclaimed debut novel Un giorno verrò a lanciare sassi alla tua finestra won the Premio Mondello Giovani in 2010. Her writing has been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Nero Magazine, and Rolling Stone Italia. She is currently a contributor to La Repubblica, and one of the organisers of the FILL (Festival of Italian Literature in London).

http://www.dedalusbooks.com/our-authors-and-translators-details.php?id=00000356&fr=00000336

Related / Latest Publication:

Claudia Durastanti, Cleopatra goes to Prison (Dedalus, 2019)

Marguerite Duras was born in 1914 in Saigon. During WWII, she took part in the French Resistance as her husband was deported to Dachau. After the Liberation, she got involved in the French Communist Party, was expelled in 1950 but continued to fight for causes such as the war in Algeria or the right to abortion. Her novel L’Amant (The Lover) won the 1984 Goncourt Prize, and her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards in 1961.

https://thenewpress.com/authors/marguerite-duras
http://www.gallimard.fr/Contributeurs/Marguerite-Duras

Related / Latest Publications:
Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir (The New Press, 2008)

© JFPaga

Born in 1982, Pierre Ducrozet is the author of four novels, including three published by Grasset: Requiem pour Lola rouge (2010, Prix de la Vocation 2011), La Vie qu’on voulait (2013), which tells the story of the European youth scattered between Berlin, Paris, London and Barcelona, and the much-lauded Eroica (2015), a biographical fiction about the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. L’Invention des corps, a wide novel about the contemporary world, published in autumn 2017 by Actes Sud, won the Prix de Flore. He is also a translator (from Spanish and English) and teaches creative writing at the Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre in Brussels, whilst living in Barcelona.

https://www.actes-sud.fr/contributeurs/ducrozet-pierre

Related / Latest Publication:

Pierre Ducrozet, L’invention des corps (Actes Sud, 2017)

© Ruth Corney

Margaret Drabble has written 17 novels, which have won numerous awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Jerusalem the Golden (1967), and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Millstone (translated into French by Anne Jobar as L'Enfant du minet, and published by Buchet-Chastel in 1969). She is a former Chairman of the National Book League (1980-82), and was awarded the CBE in 1980. She received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973. Her latest novel, The Dark Flood Rises, translated into French by Christine Laferrière as Quand monte le flot sombre (Christian Bourgois, 2017) is a reflection on the process of aging.

https://canongate.co.uk/contributors/9785-margaret-drabble/
https://www.christianbourgois-editeur.com/fiche-auteur.php?Id=440

Related / Latest Publication:

Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises (Canongate Books, 2016)