David Bellos

David Bellos studied Modern Languages at Oxford and taught French at the Universities of Edinburgh, Southampton and Manchester before moving to Princeton, where he is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. He is the author of Romain Gary. A Tall Story (2010); Jacques Tati. His Life and Art (1999); and Georges Perec. A Life in Words (1993), which was awarded the Goncourt Prize for Biography in 1994. He has translated more than thirty books from French, including Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual and novels by Ismail Kadare, the winner of the Inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005. Bellos’s essay on translation, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Transaltion and the Meaning of Everything (2011) was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. He is currently writing a book about Victor Hugo and Les Misérables.