Authors
François Busnel is a French journalist based in Paris. He has served as the Managing Editor for the magazine Lire and an editorialist for the weekly magazine L’Express and has hosted many radio shows for France Inter. Since 2008, he has hosted and produced the weekly literary talk show La Grande Librairie, broadcast in prime time on France 5. He created the magazine America in the days following the election of Donald Trump.
CHRISTOPHE BLAIN is an award-winning artist best known for the series Gus and Quai d’Orsay, for which he won the Best Album Award at Angoulême in 2013.
JEAN-MARC JANCOVICI is an engineering consultant, energy and climate expert, professor, conference speaker, writer, and independent columnist. He is co-founder of the Carbone 4 consultancy firm, and the president of the think-tank The Shift Project.
Colombe Schneck is a French journalist, filmmaker, and writer. Born in 1966 into a bourgeoise Parisian-Jewish family, she went on to study at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and Université de Paris II, and to work for various French media outlets such as Canal+, i>Télé, and France Inter until 2012. She directed two documentaries in 1999 (Nucléaire, un si long silence and Quand je suis tombé dans la télévision), and directed two feature-length films with Elzevir Productions and Arte : Femmes sans enfant, femmes suspect in 2014, and Vieux Amoureux in 2015. She is also a member of the 50/50 collective, which defends equality and diversity in cinema and audiovisual media.
She has always described her entry into the world of writing as an accident. While leafing through a magazine, she happened upon an article that described the sordid circumstances of her grandfather’s death, who was assassinated by his lover, his body cut into pieces and transported through France in a suitcase. This not only inspired her to write her first novel, L’Increvable Monsieur Schneck (2006), but also set her on her path towards a style of writing that is obsessed with family secrets, as well as uncovering the Jewish experience during the Second World War. The author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, she has received prizes (Madame Figaro and the Society of French Writers), as well as having been short-listed for the Renaudot, Femina, and Interallié prizes. She is also the recipient of scholarships from the Villa Medicis in Rome and the Institut Français, as well as a Stendhal grant which allows French writers to do research and write abroad.
Her latest novel, Lies in Paradise (2023), tells the story of the chic, picture-perfect Swiss summer camp where she spent her holidays as a child, and the grim secret of how it destroyed two of its children.
Her book The Paris Trilogy will be published in the US and UK in May 2024. It is three semi-autobiographical takes on a woman’s life, starting with Seventeen, progressing with Friendship, and then Swimming: A Love Story. Exploring questions of sexuality, bodily autonomy, femininity, friendship and loss, The Paris Trilogy is a moving meditation on a lifelong journey to reclaim the female body, accepting it for all its faults and learning to celebrate its strength.
Joe Pan is the author of six books, including the poetry best-sellers Operating Systems and Hi c cu ps, and coeditor of the popular Brooklyn Poets Anthology. His writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, The New Republic, The New York Times, and Poets & Writers, with interviews in the New York Post, Publishers Weekly, The Rumpus, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the founding publisher and editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Arts Press, honored in 2016 with a National Book Award win in Poetry, and the publisher of Augury Books, honored in 2020 with a Lambda Literary win for Best Book of Lesbian Poetry. With his wife, Joe Pan cofounded the services-oriented activist group Brooklyn Artists Helping, dedicated to fighting homelessness.
Represented by Stephanie Cabot
Kristen Millares Young is a novelist, journalist, essayist, and the author of the memoir Desire
Lines (Red Hen Press, October 6, 2026), a Ms. Magazine “Most Anticipated Feminist Book”
called “searching, generous, and unrelenting” by Melissa Febos. Her novel Subduction was a staff
pick of The Paris Review and deemed “whip-smart” by the Washington Post, “a brilliant debut”
by the Seattle Times, and “utterly unique and important” by Ms. Magazine. Winner of Nautilus
and IPPY awards, Subduction was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards and
Foreword Indies Book of the Year. Her essays, book reviews, and investigations appear in the
Washington Post, the Guardian, Literary Hub, and the anthologies No Contact, Advanced
Creative Nonfiction, Latina Outsiders, and Alone Together, winner of a 2021 Washington State
Book Award. In 2025, Kristen was in residence for the Storyknife Writers Retreat and for a
UNESCO Cities of Literature fellowship in Reykjavík, Iceland. A former Prose Writer-in-
Residence at Hugo House, she is the editor of Seismic, a finalist for a 2021 Washington State
Book Award. Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow
Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize.
Represented by Stephanie Cabot.
Melody Beattie (May 26, 1948—February 27, 2025) was a pioneering voice in self-help literature and the author of many bestselling books—including The Language of Letting Go, Playing It by Heart, The Grief Club, Beyond Codependency, and The Codependent No More Workbook. In 2009, Codependent No More was named one of the four essential self-help books of all time by Newsweek.
On behalf of Spiegel & Grau.
Sophie O’Mara is a Franco-American writer living in London. She began writing poetry following a degree in English and French at the University of Oxford. She was selected by Carol Ann Duffy for her Arvon Foundation masterclass. O’Mara has been published in Poetry London and was shortlisted twice for the Bridport Prize. Val Fex is her first novel.
Represented by Stephanie Cabot
Kellye McBride is a freelance writer, editor, and film instructor from the Portland area. Her
short fiction has been published in Nailed, Deep Overstock, and Folded Word, as well as
numerous film publications, including Sublime Horror, Scream magazine, and Horror
Homeroom. She’s been previously published in Stephen King and Philosophy. Her short
nonfiction has been recently nominated for the Bram Stoker Awards by the Horror Writer’s
Association.
Represented by Stephanie Cabot.
Gaëlle Nohant is the author of L’Ancre des rêves, published in 2007 and winner of the Encre Marine prize, organised by France’s Navy. Her second novel, La Part des flammes, tells the tragic story of the fire at the Bazar de la Charité in 1897 – it was awarded the 2016 Prix du Livre de Poche and the Prix du Livre France Bleu – Page des Librairies. In Légende d’un dormeur éveillé Gaëlle imagines the life of the writer Robert Desnos in Paris during the Roaring Twenties. It won the 2017 Prix des Librairies.
Her latest novel, The Bureau of Unknown Fates, won the 2023 Grand Prix RTL-Lire. This gripping novel is set at the heart of The International Tracing Service – an organisation that was created at the end of the Second World War to investigate Nazi crimes, search for missing people, and discover what became of them.
Currently being translated into 10 languages and adapted to the screen.
David Remnick was a reporter for The Washington Post for ten years, including four in Moscow. He joined The New Yorker as a writer in 1992 and has been the magazine’s editor since 1998. His previous book, King of the World, a biography of Muhammad Ali, was selected by Time as the top nonfiction book of the year. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire won a Pulitzer Prize.