Nicolas Bouvier

Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998) was a Swiss writer and photographer.

His travels all over the world incited him to recount his experiences and adventures. His work is marked by a commitment to report what he sees and feels, shorn of any pretence of omniscience, leading often to an intimacy bordering on the mystical. His journey from Geneva to Japan was in many ways prescient of the great eastward wave of hippies that occurred in the sixties and seventies - slow, meandering progress in a small, iconic car, carefully guarded idiosyncrasy, a rite of passage. Yet, it differs in that the travelogues this journey inspired contain deep reflections on man's intimate nature, written in a style very much aware and appreciative of the traditions and possib

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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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François-Henri Désérable

François-Henri Désérable (born Amiens, France, 6 February 1987) is a French author and a former professional ice hockey player.

His short-story, Clic! Clac! Boum!, was awarded Le Prix du Jeune Ecrivain and published in March 2012. His first book, Tu montreras ma tête au peuple, about the French revolution, was released in April 2013 by Gallimard.
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Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal est une femme de lettres française, née le 16 juin 1967 à Toulon. Elle passe son enfance au Havre, fille et petite-fille de capitaine au long cours. Elle étudie en classe préparatoire au lycée Jeanne-d'Arc de Rouen et ensuite à Paris de 1985 à 1990 l'histoire, la philosophie et l'ethnologie. Elle commence à travailler chez Gallimard jeunesse une première fois de 1991 à 1996, avant de faire deux séjours aux États-Unis, à Golden dans le Colorado en 1997. Elle reprend sa formation en passant une année à l'EHESS à Paris en 1998.

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Elle publie son premier roman, Je marche sous un ciel de traîne, en 2000, suivis en 2003 par La Vie voyageuse, puis par Ni fleurs, ni couronnes en 2006,
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Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803) was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses.

A unique case in French literature, he was for a long time considered to be as scandalous a writer as the Marquis de Sade or Nicolas-Edme Rétif. He was a military officer with no illusions about human relations, and an amateur writer; however, his initial plan was to "write a work which departed from the ordinary, which made a noise, and which would remain on earth after his death"; from this point of view he mostly attained his goals, with the fame of his masterwork Les Liaisons dangereuses . It is one of the masterpieces of novelistic literature of the 18th century,
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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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Sylvain Tesson

Sylvain Tesson est le fils de Marie-Claude et Philippe Tesson et le frère de la comédienne Stéphanie Tesson et de la journaliste d'art Daphné Tesson.

Géographe de formation, il effectue en 1993 un tour du monde à bicyclette avec Alexandre Poussin avec qui il traverse l'Himalaya à pied en 1997. Il traverse également les steppes d'Asie centrale à cheval avec la photographe et compagne Priscilla Telmon, sur plus de 3 000 km du Kazakhstan à l'Ouzbékistan. En 2004, il reprend l'itinéraire des évadés du goulag en suivant le récit de Sławomir Rawicz : The Long Walk (1955)1. Ce périple l'emmène de la Sibérie jusqu'en Inde à pied.
Sylvain était également un « escaladeur de cathédrales » et au sein d'un cercle d'acrobates on le surnommait « le prince d
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Jean de Léry

Voyageur et écrivain français.
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Wajdi Mouawad

Né au Liban le 16 octobre 1968, Wajdi Mouawad est contraint d’abandonner sa terre natale à l’âge de huit ans, pour cause de guerre civile. Débute une période d’exil qui le conduit d’abord avec sa famille à Paris. Une patrie d’adoption qu’il doit à son tour quitter en 1983, l’État lui refusant les papiers nécessaires à son maintien sur le territoire. De l’Hexagone, il rejoint alors le Québec.

C’est là qu’il fait ses études et obtient en 1991 le diplôme en interprétation de l’École nationale de théâtre du Canada à Montréal. Il codirige aussitôt avec la comédienne Isabelle Leblanc sa première compagnie, Théâtre Ô Parleur.
En 2000, il est sollicité pour prendre la direction artistique du Théâtre de Quat’Sous à Montréal pendant quatre saisons.
Il
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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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Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.

Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out,
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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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Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian author and dramatist.

The son of a prominent Hungarian-Jewish laryngologist Johann Schnitzler and Luise Markbreiter (a daughter of the Viennese doctor Philipp Markbreiter), was born in Vienna in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and began studying medicine at the local university in 1879. He received his doctorate of medicine in 1885 and worked at the Vienna's General Hospital, but ultimately abandoned medicine in favour of writing.

His works were often controversial, both for their frank description of sexuality (Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Schnitzler, confessed "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition — though actually as a result of sensitive introspection — everything that I have
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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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Guy de Maupassant

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer. He is one of the fathers of the modern short story. A protege of Flaubert, Maupassant's short stories are characterized by their economy of style and their efficient effortless dénouement. He also wrote six short novels. A number of his stories often denote the futility of war and the innocent civilians who get crushed in it - many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s.
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Boris Vian

Boris Vian was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered for novels such as L’Écume des jours and L'Arrache-cœur (translated into English as Froth on the Daydream and Heartsnatcher, respectively). He is also known for highly controversial "criminal" fiction released under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan and some of his songs (particularly the anti-war Le Déserteur). Vian was also fascinated with jazz: he served as liaison for, among others, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis in Paris, wrote for several French jazz-reviews (Le Jazz Hot, Paris Jazz) and published numerous articles dealing with jazz both in the United States and in France.
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Charles Baudelaire

Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later symbolist and modernist poets.

Reputation of Charles Pierre Baudelaire rests primarily on perhaps the most important literary art collection, published in Europe in the 19th century. Similarly, his early experiment Petits poèmes en prose (1868) ( Little Prose Poems ) most succeeded and innovated of the time.

From financial disaster to prosecution for blasphemy, drama and strife filled life of known Baudelaire with highly controversial and often dark tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Long after his death, his name represents depravity and vice. He se
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Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar, original name Marguerite de Crayencour, was a french novelist, essayist, poet and short-story writer who became the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française (French Academy), an exclusive literary institution with a membership limited to 40.
She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1947. The name “Yourcenar” is an imperfect anagram of her original name, “Crayencour.”

Yourcenar’s literary works are notable for their rigorously classical style, their erudition, and their psychological subtlety. In her most important books she re-creates past eras and personages, meditating thereby on human destiny, morality, and power. Her masterpiece is Mémoires d'Hadrien, a historical novel constituting the fictionalized memoi
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Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was a journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist.

Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888). His poems include Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The Gods of the Copybook Headings (1919), The White Man's Burden (1899), and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me
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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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Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre
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Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, realism strives for formal perfection, so the presentation of reality tends to be neutral, emphasizing the values and importance of style as an objective method of presenting reality". He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
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Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu , known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
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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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Adam de la Halle

13th century French poet.

Adam de la Halle is also known under the name Adam le Bossu (Adam the Hunchback) or Adam d'Arras.
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Marc Bloch

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (6 July 1886 in Lyon – 16 June 1944 in Saint-Didier-de-Formans) was a medieval historian, University Professor and French Army officer. Bloch was a founder of the Annales School, best known for his pioneering studies French Rural History and Feudal Society and his posthumously-published unfinished meditation on the writing of history, The Historian's Craft. He was captured and shot by the Gestapo during the German occupation of France for his work in the French Resistance.
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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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Paolo Rumiz

Paolo Rumiz è un giornalista e scrittore italiano.
Inviato speciale del "Piccolo di Trieste" e in seguito editorialista di "la Repubblica", segue dal 1986 gli eventi dell'area balcanica e danubiana; durante la dissoluzione della Jugoslavia segue in prima linea il conflitto prima in Croazia e successivamente in Bosnia ed Erzegovina.
Nel novembre 2001 è stato inviato ad Islamabad e successivamente a Kabul, per documentare l'attacco statunitense all'Afghanistan.
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Pin Yathay

Yathay Pin was born in Oudong, a village about 25 miles north of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Yathay’s father, Chhor, was a small trader, and his family, though not impoverished, was poor.

Yathay was the eldest of five children. His father had high expectations of him: Knowing that Yathay was an excellent student, Chhor sent him to a good high school in Phnom Penh. Yathay received a government scholarship after completing high school, and he went to Canada to further his studies. In 1965, Yathay graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in Montreal with a diploma in civil engineering. He went back to Cambodia and joined the Ministry of Public Works. He married his first wife soon after, and they had one son. His first wife and second baby died in ch
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