Authors

Guy Corneau was the author of several books about personal development including The Best Is Still to Come and Beyond Fear.

For sixteen years, Thierry Cruvellier has been covering war crimes trials before international tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, and Cambodia, as well as national justice efforts in Colombia and the Balkans. Cruvellier was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is the author of Court of Remorse-Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Wisconsin University Press, 2010) and The Master of Confessions(Ecco, 2014).

As a doctor, Philippe Presles’ humanist outlook has led him to specialize in preventative medicine as well as the economics of health and ethics. He has been researching consciousness for over fifteen years. Presles is the author of The Power of Consciousness,The Incredible Journey of Consciousness, and Prévenir, and holds an MBA from HEC Business School.

Francois Bizot is an ethnologist who has spent the greater part of his career studying South-East Asian Buddhism and has lived in various countries of the the Indochinese peninsula since 1965. He has taught at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes-Etudes and is professor emeritus at the Ecole Française de l’Extrême Orient.

Ingrid Betancourt was born on December 25, 1961, in Bogotá, Colombia. As a politician and a presidential candidate, she was celebrated for her determination to combat widespread corruption. In 2002 she was taken hostage by the FARC, a brutal terrorist guerrilla organization. For more than six and a half years, the FARC held her hostage in the Colombian jungle. She was rescued on July 2, 2008.

Clara (Schwarz) Kramer was born in 1927, in Zolkiew, a town in the Galicia section of Poland (currently a part of the Ukraine).  The commencement of World War II, in 1939, marked the beginning of the Russian occupation of her town. 

Clara, her younger sister Mania, and parents, Sara and Meir, lived under the occupation until 1941, when the Germans invaded and supplanted the Russians.   In an attempt to escape the Germans, a fifteen year old Clara and her family were joined by several other families as they hid together in an underground bunker that they dug, under a home. 

For almost two years, the eighteen people were hidden by righteous Christians, Valentin Beck and his family, who risked their lives, even while German soldiers shared the home with them, for prolonged periods of time.   

While underground, Clara’s mother instructed her daughter to keep a diary so there would be a record of what occurred, for posterity.  With a small bound notebook and a single pencil, Clara kept a diary of events for the next twenty months, until liberation.  The original diary is currently housed in the National Holocaust Museum, in Washington, D.C.  There were approximately 5,000 Jews in Zolkiew, before the war. Clara and her parents were among the approximate 60 that survived.  Her sister, Mania, was captured and killed by the Germans.   

After the war, Clara and her family, like most survivors, left Poland and made their way to Austria and Germany, where they spent the next four years in Displaced Persons camps.  It was in the DP camps where Clara met her husband, Sol Kramer.  They married and moved to the newly established State of Israel, in 1949, where their two children, Philip and Eli, were born.  

In 1957, the Kramer family moved to Brooklyn, New York and ultimately settled in Elizabeth, NJ, in 1965.  Clara and Sol, married for over 59 years, have been an active part of the Elizabeth Jewish Community for this entire time. They continue to devote their time and resources to organizations such as the Jewish Educational Center; the Jewish Federation; the Israel Bonds Organization; the Jewish Family & Children’s’ Service; the Union County YM & YWHA; and the Holocaust Resource Foundation at Kean University, which they helped to co-found.  

However, of all the worthy causes in which Clara is involved, her life’s work is perpetuating the memory of the atrocities of the Holocaust and the stories of bravery that resulted in the saving of lives. Clara has served as President of the Holocaust Resource Foundation, at Kean University, for the past two decades.  During this time, she has lectured at hundreds of schools throughout the Metropolitan area, telling her story of survival.  She has worked together with the Kean University Holocaust Resource Center, accompanying groups of teachers as they made their pilgrimages, each semester, to the National Holocaust Museum, in Washington, answering questions and validating the teaching of the Center with her real-life experiences.   

Clara has recently authored a biography of her wartime experience called, Clara’s War, that is scheduled for publication, in Europe, in April of this year.  She hopes that this book will continue her mission of “telling the story”, long after she is gone.

Antoine Audouard was born in Paris in 1956, the son of journalist and writer Yvan Audouard, and grandson of Surrealism companion André Thirion, who wrote Revolutionaries without a Revolution.

By the time he was twenty-five he had written three novels, published by Gallimard. He left writing to “do some living”. In 1987, with Bernard Fixot, he created Editions Fixot and went on to publish huge commercial successes such as Betty Mahmoody’s Not without my daughter (3.6 million copies sold) and young literary talent (a future Pulitzer-prize winner) : Michael Chabon (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) and NBA winner Jonathan Franzen (The Twenty-Seventh City), to name but two. Editions Fixot grew to become one of France’s most successful independent commercial general trade publishers.   In 1993  Audouard and Fixot sold the company to France’s leading media group (at the time called Havas, today called Editis) and Audouard went on to become the publishing director of Editions Robert Laffont.

In 1999 Audouard resigned from his position to devote himself fulltime to his lasting passion: writing. In 2000 Audouard published Farewell My Only One (published by Editions Gallimard). Aclaimed by the critics, short-listed for the Goncourt literary prize and a bestseller, the translation rights to Farewell My Only One were sold in fourteen countries and it was published in the US by Houghton & Mifflin. In 2001 Antoine Audouard co-wrote a bestselling trilogy based on the conquest of the Incas (The Incas). Published under a pen name – A.B. Daniel – it was translated in 26 languages. The US publisher was Scribners. Antoine Audouard’s other works include Under my Skin (Gallimard, 2003), A House at the Edge of the World (Gallimard, 2002), The Sands of Time (Robert Laffont, September 2003), and A Bridge of Birds (Gallimard 2006). A Bridge of Birds was set in Indochina during the French war (1945-54) and was shortlisted for the Goncourt Prize. “The Arab” was published by Editions de l’Olivier in the fall of 2009 to outstanding reviews.

Audouard has taught creative writing course in the journalism school of Sciences Po. He is a regular contributor the NYT Op-Ed pages and to Le Monde 2, the weekly magazine supplement of Le Monde. He has participated in the PEN International Literary festival in NY and has spokein at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He shares his life between Paris and New York.

Marie de Hennezel is a clinical therapist and the author of ten previous books, including the international bestseller Seize the Day and The Warmth of the Heart Prevents Your Body from Rusting. She is the recipient of the Legion of Honor, the highest honorary decoration in France. She lives in Paris.

Tzvetan Todorov, 1939-2017, was an essayist, historian and philosopher of world renown. His books include In Defence of the Enlightenment, Hope and Memory, The New World Disorder, and the The Apostles of Beauty. He was the 2008 winner of the Prince of Asturias Award.

Michèle Fitoussi was born in Tunisia to French parents, and moved to Paris at the age of five, where she still lives to this day.  She graduated from the prestigious Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris, and chose very early on to pursue a career in journalism.

She has worked for the past twenty-five years at Elle magazine. Her journalistic work has led her down many avenues; Michèle has interviewed influential decision makers and world leaders in areas as varied as politics, human sciences, sports, literature and the media. She has also remained firmly dedicated to writing about the experiences of women and their fight for equality not only in France, but also globally.

Michèle is also a screenwriter and novelist. In her first novel Superwoman (1987) sold than 400,000 copies worldwide. In 1999, she cowrote the international best-seller The Prisoner – Malika Oufkir’s story. Translated into 30 languages, An Oprah Winfrey book club pick, The Prisoner sold more than a million copies worldwide and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 25.

She collaborated with Pierre Richard, Lambert Wilson and Sara Forestier on the screenplay for Thomas Gilou’s comedy Viktor (2009) – the adaptation of her novel.

In 2010 she wrote Helena Rubinstein – The Woman Who Invented Beauty which is currently being adapted for television.

In 2018, she published a biography of Janet Flanner, the American journalist who was The New Yorker’s correspondent in Paris from 1925 – 1975.

In 2023 she published La famille de Pantin the powerful and heart-wrenching narrative of the Tunisian Jews who were exiled in France.