Frédéric-Louis Sauser, better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement.
Louis Marie Malle was a French film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in both French cinema and Hollywood. Described as "eclectic" and "a filmmaker difficult to pin down", Malle made documentaries, romances, period dramas, and thrillers. He often depicted provocative or controversial subject matter.
Bernard-Henri Georges Lévy is a French public intellectual. Often referred to in France simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" movement in 1976. His opinions, political activism and publications have also been the subject of several controversies over the years.
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer, and pamphleteer. He is one of the major figures associated with Russian formalism.
Pierre Ryckmans, better known by his pen name Simon Leys, was a Belgian-Australian writer, essayist and literary critic, translator, art historian, sinologist, and university professor, who lived in Australia from 1970. His work particularly focused on the politics and traditional culture of China, calligraphy, French and English literature, the commercialization of universities, and nautical fiction. Through the publication of his trilogy Les Habits neufs du président Mao (1971), Ombres chinoises (1974) and Images brisées (1976), he was one of the first intellectuals to denounce the Cultural Revolution in China and the idolizing of Mao in the West.
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz was a French-speaking Swiss writer.
Emmanuel Carrère is a French author, screenwriter and film director.
Kurt Gerron was a German Jewish actor and film director. He and his wife, Olga, were murdered in the Holocaust.
André Maurois was a French author.
Marc Ferro was a French historian.
Frederic Michael Raphael FRSL is an American-born British novelist, biographer, journalist and Oscar-winning screenwriter, known for writing the screenplays for Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd,Two for the Road, and Stanley Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide Shut. Raphael rose to prominence in the early 1960s with the publication of several acclaimed novels, but most notably with the release of the John Schlesinger film Darling, starring Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde, a romantic drama set in Swinging London, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1966. Two years later he was nominated again in the same category, this time for his work on Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road, starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Since the death of screenwriter D. M. Marshman Jr. in 2015, he is the earliest surviving recipient of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and the sole surviving recipient of the now retired BAFTA category of Best British Screenplay.
Anatoly Naumovich Rybakov was a Soviet and Russian writer, the author of the anti-Stalinist Children of the Arbat trilogy, the novel Heavy Sand, and many popular children books including Adventures of Krosh, Dirk and Bronze Bird. One of the last of his works was his memoir The Novel of Memoirs (Роман-Воспоминание) telling about all the different people he met during his long life. Writer Maria Rybakova is his granddaughter.
Georges Philippe Friedmann, was a French sociologist and philosopher, known for his influential work on the effects of industrial labor on individuals and his criticisms of the uncontrolled embrace of technological change in twentieth-century Europe and the United States.
Edgardo Cozarinsky is a writer and filmmaker. He is best known for his Spanish-language novel Vudú urbano.
Pierre Braunberger was a French producer, executive producer, and actor.
Benjamin Stora is a French historian, expert on North Africa, who is widely considered one of the world's leading authorities on Algerian history. He was born in a Jewish family that left the country following its War of Independence in 1962. Stora holds two PhDs and a Doctorate of the State (1991).
Jean Lartéguy was the pen name of Jean Pierre Lucien Osty, a French writer, journalist, and former soldier.
Raymond Depardon is a French photographer, photojournalist and documentary filmmaker.
Alexandre Najjar is a Lebanese and French writer, lawyer and literary critic. He was born in Beirut and studied at Panthéon-Assas University and University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. He holds a Doctorate in Business administration and is specialized in banking and finance law. He is the author of more than 30 books translated into more than 12 languages. In addition to poetry and novels, he has written non fiction works like the biography of Khalil Gibran, the author of The Prophet., a book about the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Nazi Germany and a book about the Arab Spring.
Jean Schalit was a French journalist.
