David Bellos

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David Bellos (1945-October 26 2025) was a British academic, translator and biographer. [1] He was the Meredith Howland Pyne professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University in the United States, [2] and was frequently director of its translation and intercultural communication program from 2007 to 2025.[ citation needed ]

Contents

Biography

Bellos wrote literary biographies of Romain Gary and Georges Perec, and published work on Honoré de Balzac; and his The Novel of the Century tells the story of the writing of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. He composed a biography of the filmmaker Jacques Tati, Jacques Tati: His Life and Art , and appeared in The Magnificent Tati, a documentary about him.[ citation needed ]

Other works include an introduction to translation studies, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything (2011) [3] and Who Owns This Sentence. A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, written with Alexandre Montagu and published in 2024.

He translated much of the work of Perec into English, including the novel Life: A User's Manual .

He won the first Man Booker International Prize for translation in 2005 for his translations of works by Albanian author Ismail Kadare, despite not speaking Albanian. His translations were done from previous French translations. [4]

He was the father of 3 children (and 7 grandchildren) including writer and broadcaster Alex Bellos. [5]

Awards and honours

Publications

Translations

Biographies

Other books

References

  1. ↑ Bellos, David (1945-....) (in French). Catalogue général. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Accessed April 2024.
  2. 1 2 3 4 David Bellos at Princeton University
  3. ↑ Is That A Fish In Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything Archived 24 July 2013 at the Wayback Machine at Janklow & Nesbit
  4. 1 2 "The Englishing of Ismail Kadare" by David Bellos, complete review Quarterly, vol. VI, issue 2 – May 2005
  5. ↑ Anon (2017). "Bellos, Alexander" . Who's Who (online Oxford University Press  ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.289184.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  6. ↑ "The 2017 American Library in Paris Book Award goes to The Novel of the Century" (Press release). American Library in Paris. Google Drive. 3 November 2017. Retrieved 3 January 2018.
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