David Bellos (born 1945) is a British academic, translator and biographer. [1] He is the Meredith Howland Pyne professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University in the United States, [2] and was director of its translation and intercultural communication programme from 2007 to 2019.[ citation needed ]
Bellos has written literary biographies of Romain Gary and Georges Perec, and has published work on Honoré de Balzac; his The Novel of the Century relates the writing of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. He has also written 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 has 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 is the father of writer and broadcaster Alex Bellos. [5]
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.
The Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". The prize carries a symbolic reward of only 10 euros, but results in considerable recognition and book sales for the winning author. Four other prizes are also awarded: prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle, prix Goncourt de la Poésie (poetry) and prix Goncourt de la Biographie (biography). Of the "big six" French literary awards, the Prix Goncourt is the best known and most prestigious. The other major literary prizes include the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française, the Prix Femina, the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Interallié and the Prix Médicis.
Romain Gary, born Roman Kacew, was a French novelist, diplomat, film director, and World War II aviator. He is the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt under two names. He is considered a major writer of French literature of the second half of the 20th century. He was married to Lesley Blanch, then Jean Seberg.
Jacques Tati was a French mime, filmmaker, actor and screenwriter. In an Entertainment Weekly poll of the Greatest Movie Directors, he was voted the 46th greatest of all time, although he directed only six feature-length films.
Ismail Kadare is an Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is a leading international literary figure and intellectual. He focused on poetry until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made him famous internationally.
Le Père Goriot is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), included in the Scènes de la vie privée section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set in Paris in 1819, it follows the intertwined lives of three characters: the elderly doting Goriot, a mysterious criminal-in-hiding named Vautrin and a naive law student named Eugène de Rastignac.
Albanian literature stretches back to the Middle Ages and comprises those literary texts and works written in Albanian. It may also refer to literature written by Albanians in Albania, Kosovo and the Albanian diaspora particularly in Italy. Albanian occupies an independent branch within the Indo-European family and does not have any other closely related language. The origin of Albanian is not entirely known, but it may be a successor of the ancient Illyrian language.
Georges Perec: A Life in Words is a biography of Georges Perec by David Bellos, Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, who also translated Perec's major novel Life: A User's Manual (1978) from French into English. His prize-winning biography contains a full list of Perec's works.
20th-century French literature is literature written in French from 1900 to 1999. For literature made after 1999, see the article Contemporary French literature. Many of the developments in French literature in this period parallel changes in the visual arts. For more on this, see French art of the 20th century.
Hervé Le Tellier is a French writer and linguist, and a member of the international literary group Oulipo. He is its fourth president. Other notable members have included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Jacques Roubaud, Jean Lescure and Harry Mathews. He won the 2020 Prix Goncourt for The Anomaly.
The Scott Moncrieff Prize, established in 1965, and named after the translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, is an annual £2,000 literary prize for French to English translation, awarded to one or more translators every year for a full-length work deemed by the Translators Association to have "literary merit". The Prizes is currently sponsored by the Institut Français du Royaume Uni. Only translations first published in the United Kingdom are considered for the accolade.
Which Moped with Chrome-plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard? is a comic novella by Georges Perec. Perec's second published work, it was originally published in 1966 in French as Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour? The English translation by Ian Monk was published in Three by Perec by David R. Godine, Publisher in 2004. The Review of Contemporary Fiction called Monk's translation "gorgeous and eloquent".
Chronicle in Stone is a novel by Albanian author Ismail Kadare. First published in Albanian in 1971, and translated into English by Arshi Pipa in 1987, it describes life in a small Albanian city during World War II. A revised translation by David Bellos was published in 2007.
Things: A Story of the Sixties is a 1965 novel by Georges Perec, his first.
The 100 Books of the Century is a list of the hundred most memorable books of the 20th century, regardless of language, according to a poll performed during the spring of 1999 by the French retailer Fnac and the Paris newspaper Le Monde.
Agamemnon's Daughter is a 2003 novella by the Albanian writer and inaugural International Man Booker Prize winner Ismail Kadare. It is the first part of a diptych of which the second and longer part is The Successor. It is considered by many critics to be one of the author's greatest works.
The Successor is a 2003 novel by the Albanian writer and inaugural International Man Booker Prize winner Ismail Kadare. It is the second part of a diptych of which the first part is the novella Agamemnon's Daughter. The diptych is ranked by many critics among the author's greatest works.
Twilight of the Eastern Gods is a novel by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. It was published in installments in Albania between 1962 and 1978, and published in full in 1981 in the French translation of Jusuf Vrioni. The English translation by David Bellos, published in 2014, was made from Vrioni's French.
The Anomaly is a 2020 novel by French writer Hervé Le Tellier. It was published by Éditions Gallimard on 20 August 2020. An English translation by Adriana Hunter was published by Other Press on 23 November 2021 (ISBN 978-1-63542-169-9).