Authors Similar like Joseph Kessel

Jean Rolin

Jean Rolin is a French writer and journalist known for his distinctive narrative style and profound exploration of sociopolitical issues. Born on June 14, 1949, in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, Rolin has had a career marked by an interplay between journalism and literature. His works often blend fiction and reportage, creating a unique hybrid that reflects his sharp observational skills and deep engagement with the world.

Rolin studied literature at the University of Paris but found himself drawn to the tumultuous political landscape of the 1960s. He became actively involved in leftist movements, an experience that later influenced his writing, particularly in his nuanced depictions of political and social dynamics.

His career as a journalist

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Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano is a French-language author and playwright and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.

He is a winner of the 1972 Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française, and the 1978 Prix Goncourt for his novel "Rue des boutiques obscures".

Modiano's parents met in occupied Paris during World War II and began a clandestine relationship. Modiano's childhood took place in a unique atmosphere: with an absent father -- of which he heard troubled stories of dealings with the Vichy regime -- and a Flemish-actress mother who frequently toured. His younger brother's sudden death also greatly influenced his writings.

While he was at Henri-IV lycee, he took geometry lessons from writer Raymond Queneau, who was a friend of Modiano's mother. He

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Russell Banks

Russell Banks was a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He has written fiction, and more recently, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997.

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Chris McGreal

Chris McGreal is a reporter for the Guardian. A former correspondent in Johannesburg, Jerusalem and Washington DC, he now writes from across the United States.
He has won awards for his reporting of the Rwandan genocide, Israel/Palestine, and on the impact of economic recession in America. He received the James Cameron prize for "work as a journalist that has combined moral vision and professional integrity". He was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism for reporting that "penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth".
He is a former merchant seaman.

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Marcel Aymé

Marcel Aymé was a French novelist, children's writer, humour writer, screenwriter and theatre playwright. His writings include The Man Who Walked Through Walls (Le Passe-Muraille), one of his most famous short stories for which there is a monument in the Montmartre Quarter of Paris.

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Jean-Christophe Rufin

Jean-Christophe Rufin is a French doctor and novelist. He is the president of Action Against Hunger and one of the founders of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without borders). He was Ambassador of France in Senegal from 2007 to June 2010.

Rufin was born in Bourges, Cher in 1952. An only child, he was raised by his grandparents, because his father had left the family and his mother worked in Paris. His grandfather, a doctor and member of the French Resistance during World War II, had been imprisoned for two years at Buchenwald.

In 1977, after medical school, Rufin went to Tunisia as a volunteer doctor. He led his first humanitarian mission in Eritrea,where he met Azeb, who became his second wife.

A graduate of the Institut d'études politi

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Roger Frison-Roche

Born in 1906 in Paris, Roger Frison-Roche, an alpinist, mountain guide, journalist, and explorer before he turned novelist, produced fiction that celebrated the splendors and rigors of the Alps, the Sahara, and the Scandinavian North. Two of his Alpine novels, Premier de cordée, translated into English as First on the Rope, and La Grande Crevasse, present adventure stories whose mountain-guide protagonists titillate readers with the appealing skill and daring exacted by the mountain.

Source : Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook by Patrick D. Murphy, Terry Gifford, Katsunori Yamazato (p. 203)

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Marcel Pagnol

Marcel Pagnol was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. In 1946, he became the first filmmaker elected to the Académie Française.

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François Mauriac

François Charles Mauriac was a French writer and a member of the Académie française. He was awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life." Mauriac is acknowledged to be one of the greatest Roman Catholic writers of the 20th century.

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François Kersaudy

Le professeur François Kersaudy, historien polyglotte et biographe de Churchill, Goering et Mountbatten, est aussi l'auteur du seul ouvrage au monde sur les relations entre de Gaulle et Churchill (Perrin). Dans la collection Maîtres de Guerre, il a également écrit Hitler, Staline et MacArthur.

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Albert Cohen

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Born Abraham Albert Cohen in Corfu, Greece, in 1895, as part of an important Sephardic Jewish community on the island. Albert’s parents, who owned a soap factory, moved to Marseille, France when he was a child. Albert Cohen discusses this period in his novel Le livre de ma mère (The Book of my Mother). He studied at a private Catholic school. In 1904, he started high school at Lycée Thiers, and graduated in 1913.

In 1914, he left Marseille for Geneva, Switzerland and enrolled in Law school. He graduated from Law School in 1917 and enrolled in Literature School in 1917 until 1919. In 1919, He became a Swiss citizen. That same year he married Elisabeth Broch

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Sorj Chalandon

Sorj Chalandon est un journaliste et écrivain français.

Sorj Chalandon is a French journalist and writer.

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Émile Zola

Émile Zola was a prominent French novelist, journalist, and playwright widely regarded as a key figure in the development of literary naturalism. His work profoundly influenced both literature and society through its commitment to depicting reality with scientific objectivity and exploring the impact of environment and heredity on human behavior. Born and raised in France, Zola experienced early personal hardship following the death of his father, which deeply affected his understanding of social and economic struggles—a theme that would later permeate his writings.
Zola began his literary career working as a clerk for a publishing house, where he developed his skills and cultivated a passion for literature. His early novels, such as Thérèse

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Mario Vargas Llosa

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the Spanish language and Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".
Vargas Llosa rose to international fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y l

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Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig was one of the world's most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America, and Europe. He produced novels, plays, biographies, and journalist pieces. Among his most famous works are Beware of Pity, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. He and his second wife committed suicide in 1942.
Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany before settling in Salzburg in 1913. In 1934, driven into exile by the Nazis, he emigrated to England and then, in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York. Finding only growing loneliness and disillusionment in their new surroundings, he and his second wife committed suicide.
Zweig's interest in psychology and the teachings of Sigmund Freu

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Romain Gary

Romain Gary was a Jewish-French novelist, film director, World War II aviator and diplomat. He also wrote under the pen name Émile Ajar .

Born Roman Kacew (Yiddish: קצב, Russian: Кацев), Romain Gary grew up in Vilnius to a family of Lithuanian Jews. He changed his name to Romain Gary when he escaped occupied France to fight with Great Britain against Germany in WWII. His father, Arieh-Leib Kacew, abandoned his family in 1925 and remarried. From this time Gary was raised by his mother, Nina Owczinski. When he was fourteen, he and his mother moved to Nice, France. In his books and interviews, he presented many different versions of his father's origin, parents, occupation and childhood.

He later studied law, first in Aix-en-Provence and then

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Amin Maalouf

Amin Maalouf (Arabic: أمين معلوف; alternate spelling Amin Maluf) is a Lebanese journalist and novelist. He writes and publishes primarily in French.

Most of Maalouf's books have a historical setting, and like Umberto Eco, Orhan Pamuk, and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Maalouf mixes fascinating historical facts with fantasy and philosophical ideas. In an interview Maalouf has said that his role as a writer is to create "positive myths". Maalouf's works, written with the skill of a master storyteller, offer a sensitive view of the values and attitudes of different cultures in the Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean world.

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Robert Merle

Born in Tebessa located in ,what was then, the French colony of Algeria. Robert Merle and his family moved to France in 1918. Merle wrote in many styles and won the Prix Goncourt for his novel Week-end à Zuydcoote. He has also written a 13 book series of historical novels, Fortune de France. Recreating 16th and 17th century France through the eyes of a fictitious Protestant doctor turned spy, he went so far as to write it in the period's French making it virtually untranslatable.

His novels Un animal doué de la raison (A Sentient Animal, 1967), a stark Cold War satire inspired by John Lilly's studies of dolphins and the Caribbean Crisis, and Malevil (1972), a post-apocalyptic story, were both translated into English and filmed, the former as

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René Barjavel

René Barjavel, né le 24 janvier 1911 à Nyons (Drôme) et décédé le 24 novembre 1985 à Paris, est un écrivain et journaliste français principalement connu pour ses romans d'anticipation.

Certains thèmes y reviennent fréquemment : chute de la civilisation causée par les excès de la science et la folie de la guerre, caractère éternel et indestructible de l'amour (Ravage, Le Grand Secret, La Nuit des temps, Une rose au paradis). Son écriture se veut poétique, onirique et, parfois, philosophique. Il a aussi abordé dans de remarquables essais l'interrogation empirique et poétique sur l'existence de Dieu (notamment, La Faim du tigre), et le sens de l'action de l'homme sur la Nature. Il fut aussi scénariste/dialoguiste de films. On lui doit en partic

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Giuliano da Empoli

Giuliano da Empoli è un saggista e consigliere politico italiano e svizzero che vive a Parigi, dove insegna politica comparata a Sciences-Po. Nato in Francia, è cresciuto in diversi paesi europei, si è laureato in Giurisprudenza all'Università La Sapienza di Roma e ottenuto il master in Scienze Politiche all'Institut d'études politiques di Parigi. E'presidente del think tank Volta.

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Alain Damasio

Alain Damasio, né Alain Raymond le 1er août 1969 à Lyon, est un écrivain français de science-fiction. Il choisit ce patronyme en l'honneur de sa grand-mère Andrée Damasio.

Né d'un père carrossier et d'une mère agrégée d'anglais1, Alain Damasio obtient un bac scientifique. Après une classe préparatoire HEC, il intègre l'ESSEC, qu'il quitte en 1991. Il choisit de s'isoler (d'abord dans le Vercors puis à Nonza, en Corse) pour s'adonner à l'écriture. Son domaine de prédilection est l'anticipation politique. Il marie ce genre à des éléments de science-fiction ou de fantasy.

Jeune, il écrit de nombreuses nouvelles. Son premier texte long vendu à plus de 50 000 exemplaires est La Zone du dehors, roman d’anticipation qui s’intéresse aux sociétés de c

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Albert Camus

Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel Prize of 1957 for literature.

Origin and his experiences of this representative of non-metropolitan literature in the 1930s dominated influences in his thought and work.

He also adapted plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Requiem for a Nun of William Faulkner. One may trace his enjoyment of the theater back to his membership in l'Equipe, an Algerian group, whose "collective creation" Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.

Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectu

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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

People best know French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry for his fairy tale The Little Prince (1943).

He flew for the first time at the age of 12 years in 1912 at the Ambérieu airfield and then determined to a pilot. Even after moving to a school in Switzerland and spending summer vacations at the château of the family at Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens in east, he kept that ambition. He repeatedly uses the house at Saint-Maurice.

Later, in Paris, he failed the entrance exams for the naval academy and instead enrolled at the prestigious l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1921, Saint-Exupéry, stationed in Strasbourg, began serving in the military. He learned and forever settled his career path as a pilot. After leaving the service in 1923, Sa

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Kamel Daoud

Né en 1970 à Mostaganem, Kamel Daoud est journaliste au Quotidien d’Oran où il tient une chronique à succès « Raïna raïkoum ». Il est l’auteur de plusieurs ouvrages dont le recueil de nouvelles La Préface du nègre ( barzakh, 2008 ) récompensé par le Prix Mohammed Dib et traduit en allemand ainsi qu’en italien.

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The Algerian writer and journalist, Kamel Daoud is the winner of the edition 2014 of the Five Continents Prize. This was the decision of the jury chaired by the Nobel Prize of literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Clézio on 26th September 2014 in Paris at the head office of the International Organization of the Francophonie. The novel “Meursault, The Counter-Inquiry” (Barzakh Editions in 2013) by the Algerian author

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Gaël Faye

French-Rwandan Gaël Faye is an author, composer and hip hop artist. He was born in 1982 in Burundi, and has a Rwandan mother and French father. In 1995, after the outbreak of the civil war and the Rwandan genocide, the family moved to France. Gaël studied finance and worked in London for two years for an investment fund, then he left London to embark on a career of writing and music. He is as influenced by Creole literature as he is by hip hop culture, and released an album in 2010 with the group Milk Coffee & Sugar. In 2013, his first solo album, Pili Pili sur un Croissant au Beurre, appeared. It was recorded between Bujumbura and Paris, and is filled with a plethora of musical influences: rap laced with soul and jazz, semba, Congolese rum

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Jean-Baptiste Andrea

Jean-Baptiste Andrea, né le 4 avril 1971 à Saint-Germain-en-Laye, est un écrivain, scénariste et réalisateur français. Il reçoit le prix Femina des lycéens et le prix du premier roman pour son premier livre, Ma reine, sorti en 2017, le Grand Prix RTL-Lire en 2021, ainsi que le prix Goncourt 2023 et le Grand prix des lectrices de Elle pour son quatrième roman, Veiller sur elle.

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Philippe Collin

Philippe Collin est un producteur de radio, auteur et journaliste. Il effectue des études d'histoire à l'Université de Bretagne occidentale, à Brest. Il est titulaire d'une maîtrise d'histoire contemporaine consacrée à l'épuration des collaborateurs à la Libération.

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Pierre Assouline

Pierre Assouline is a French author and journalist.

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Marc Dugain

Marc Dugain is a French novelist and filmmaker renowned for his historical and political narratives. His debut novel, La Chambre des officiers (1998), inspired by his grandfather's work with World War I veterans, garnered critical acclaim and won multiple literary awards. Dugain's oeuvre often delves into the lives of prominent figures and events, as seen in works like La Malédiction d'Edgar (2005) and Une exécution ordinaire (2007). Beyond literature, he has directed several films, including adaptations of his own novels, and has contributed to theater and graphic novels. Dugain's storytelling is marked by a deep exploration of power dynamics, historical intricacies, and the human condition.

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Sarah Kaminsky

Sarah Kaminsky is an actress, screenwriter and author born in Algeria. She was three years old when she immigrated to France with her father Adolfo Kaminsky, two brothers and her mother Leïla, a Tuareg Algerian, law student, and anti-colonial activist whose father was a progressive imam. Sarah Kaminsky’s first book is the best-selling biography of her father, Adolfo Kaminsky, published by Éditions Calmann-Lévy in 2009 and now translated into eight languages. She has a son and lives in Paris.

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Gabriel Mamani Magne

Gabriel Mamani Magne nasceu em La Paz e vive em Goiânia. É formado em sociologia e direito e fez mestrado em literatura. Seul, São Paulo venceu o Prêmio Nacional de Romance da Bolívia em 2019.

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Henry de Monfreid

Henry de Monfreid (14 November 1879 in Leucate – 13 December 1974) was a French adventurer and author. Born in Leucate, Aude, France, he was the son of artist painter Georges-Daniel de Monfreid and knew Paul Gauguin as a child.

Monfreid was famous for his travels in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa coast from Tanzania to Aden, Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula and Suez, that he sailed in his various expeditions as adventurer, smuggler and gunrunner (during which he said he more than once escaped the Royal Navy coast-guards cutters).

Monfreid is probably best known in the English-speaking world for the following two books:

Hashish: A Smuggler's Tale and
Secrets of the Red Sea, a book about gunrunning.

His books include

Les secrets de la mer Rouge

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Edgar Morin

Edgar Morin (born Edgar Nahoum) is a French philosopher and sociologist who has been internationally recognized for his work on complexity and "complex thought," and for his scholarly contributions to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, sociology, visual anthropology, ecology, education, and systems biology. He holds degrees in history, economics, and law. Though less well known in the United States due to the limited availability of English translations of his over 60 books, Morin is renowned in the French-speaking world, Europe, and Latin America.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Morin's family migrated from the Greek town of Salonica to Marseille and later to Paris, where Edgar was born. He first became tied to socialism

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Joseph Kessel

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