Authors
After suffering a massive stroke, Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French Elle and the father of two young children, found himself completely paralysed and speechless. Able only to move one eyelid, he ‘dictated’ this remarkable book.
David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D., was Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and co-founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine. He co-directed an NIH laboratory for the study of clinical cognitive neuroscience and has published more than ninety articles in scientific journals.
Anticancer, A New Way of Life became an international bestseller and was translated into more than forty languages. His last book, On Peut Se Dire Au Revoir Plusieurs Fois, is a number 1 bestseller in France. Following a yearlong battle with a relapse of brain cancer, David died in July 2011.
Zlata Filipovic was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the age of ten, she started keeping a diary, which, when the conflict began in former Yugoslavia, became a record of the war and survival in her city. Zlata’s Diary was published first in France in 1993 and was an instant international best-seller. It has since been translated into thirty-six languages and is required reading in many schools around the world.
She holds a BA in Human Sciences from Oxford University and an MPhil in International Peace Studies from Trinity College Dublin. She has spoken extensively at schools and universities around the world about her experiences and has worked on many occasions with different organisations such as the Anne Frank House, UN and UNICEF, also being a three-time member of UNESCO Jury for Children’s and Young People’s Literature Prize for Tolerance.
Her written work includes contributions to several books, radio programmes and newspapers, including a foreword for The Freedom Writers Diary (Doubleday, 1997) and the English translation of Milosevic: The People’s Tyrant (I.B. Tauris, 2004), for which she has also written a foreword. She also co-edited Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries form WWI to Iraq (Penguin, 2006).
Zlata served for six years on the Executive Committee of Amnesty International Ireland and is currently making documentary films in Ireland and internationally. Her documentary work includes the Emmy-nominated documentary The Farthest as well as Grierson nominated Here Was Cuba and Irish Film and Television Award-winners Somebody To Love and Blood of the Irish. She specialises in social issues, science and historical documentaries.
Born in 1947, Danielle Thiéry comes from a long line of Burgundy farmers. While studying classics, law, and psychology, she trained as a counsellor for children. It was this that first inspired her interest in law enforcement. She joined France’s police force in 1969, one of the first women ever admitted.
She began her career in Lyon, where she was assigned to Child Protection, then to Drug Enforcement (becoming head of the division at 25 years old), and the Vice Division, gaining recognition for her success in these fields that had previously been closed to women. In 1976 she became one of the first women to reach the rank of Commissary, an achievement that was widely covered in the French press. In the following years, transport security became Danielle’s specialty – developing an expertise in anti-terrorist work through her experience with border surveillance, airport services (as chief of police at Lyon Airport), and the railroad police (as head of the National Railroad Police). She was promoted to Division Commissary in 1991, the first woman in France’s history to reach this rank.
Having always been an avid reader of thrillers in particular, it was while she worked on a French TV series based on her life that Danielle developed a passion for writing. She is now the author of 25 books, for which she has received several awards – notably the prestigious Quai des Orfèvres prize for her novel Des Clous dans le cœur in 2013. She is also a non-fiction writer on the French police force, and historical criminal cases.
Danielle has also worked on original audiovisual projects. Most notably, she co-wrote the television adaptation of her series of novels featuring Superintendent Marion for the French TV channel 13ème rue, entitled Marion. The series was broadcast in 2022, and a second season is currently in development. She has since written for many other TV series and telefilms, and she is currently writing an ecological thriller series.
As a fan of American detective thrillers and their gripping darkness, Danielle’s books shed light on the real-life experience of police officers who see the worst of humanity every day, and depend on one another for survival.
Adam Ross was born and raised in New York City in 1967 and now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two daughters. His first novel Mr. Peanut (2010) was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. A true crime story about a video game designer whose wife is found dead with peanuts lodged in her throat, the novel is a thrilling whirlwind, where facts are combined with guilty fictions, and the reader is forced to question what is the truth, and what is a lie.
His collection of short stories, Ladies and Gentlemen, was featured in Kirkus Reviews’ best books of the year list in 2011. He is also a prolific non-fiction writer, with features in The New York Times Book Review, The Daily Beast, and The Wall Street Journal. He was a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University and is the editor-in-chief of The Sewanee Review.
Playworld, is set for publication in 2025.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the bestselling author of Infidel, Nomad, The Caged Virgin, and Heretic, which have been translated into 38 languages. Born in Somalia and raised a Muslim, she grew up in Africa and Saudi Arabia before seeking asylum in 1992 in the Netherlands, where she went from cleaning factories to winning a seat in the Dutch Parliament. A prominent speaker, debater, and journalist, she was chosen as one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”. She is a fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the founder of the AHA Foundation.
Stephen Clarke was born in St Albans, England, and grew up in Bournemouth (“England’s answer to Malibu”), where he played bass in some of the worst rock bands in musical history before leaving town to study French and German at Oxford. He gained a first-class degree in Modern Languages, but refused to go for interviews with any big companies, and was told by his tutor, “if you have any children, don’t send them here.” The tutor has since died. After university, Stephen took a series of high-powered jobs in the wine industry (grape picking), tertiary sector (washing up in a German hotel), and in international diplomacy (teaching English to bored French businessmen). He then moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where he was hired to put rude words into French and German dictionaries – check out his work on “motherf*cker” in the Collins-Robert French-English dictionary.
The travel bug soon bit again, and in 1993 he emigrated to Paris take a job as a journalist on an English-language magazine, of which he eventually became editor-in-chief. While a journalist, he wrote sketches for the BBC Radio satirical news programme Week Ending, and a story, O Solo Mio, for legendary American illustrator Gilbert Shelton. He had been writing fiction for several years, and, despite fierce opposition from his bank manager, finally decided to self-publish three novels – Beam Me Up, Who Killed Beano? and A Year in the Merde via his own (fictional) company, Red Garage Books.
The publication date for A Year in the Merde was April 1, 2004. He began trying to sell A Year in the Merde first, as he was living in Paris, and after three months of schlepping copies around the streets in a shopping trolley, he was invited to do a reading at an English-language bookshop. He also attracted the attention of Susanna Lea, who signed him up and sparked off a bidding war between British publishers. Transworld UK won the auction, mainly because they promised Stephen that they had their own delivery service, so he would not have to do any more heavy lifting.
Susanna Lea Associates have since sold the rights to A Year in the Merde to 21 publishers around the world, and in 2005 Stephen was nominated for a British Book Award for Best Newcomer. In 2005, he published Merde Actually, the second novel starring the young Englishman Paul West. It went to number one in Britain’s Bookseller Original Fiction chart. Stephen followed this up in 2006 with Talk to the Snail, The Ten Commandments for Understanding the French, a little book that tries to describe French society in chapters like “thou shalt not love thy neighbour”, “thou shalt be wrong” and “thou shalt not get served” . April 2007 saw the publication of Merde Happens, in which Paul West drives across the USA in a Mini.
The fourth Paul West novel, a comedy thriller entitled Dial M for Merde, was published in the US in September 2008. The fifth, The Merde Factor, was published in Fall 2012.
Stephen has now sold well over 2.5 million books worldwide. He still lives in Paris and “divides his time between writing and not writing”. The film adaptation of A Year in the Merde is currently in development, and Stephen is one of the presenters of a new comedy documentary series called Johnny Saucisson, made for French TV channel Canal +. Stephen has contributed to the Op-Ed page of the NYT and is a regular contributor to England’s Observer newspaper and the London Sunday Times Travel section.
http://www.stephenclarkewriter.com
Marc Levy was born in France. When he turned eighteen, he joined the Red Cross, where he spent the next six years, after which he created a computer graphics company based in France and the United States. Six years later, he co-founded an architecture firm with two friends; the company soon became one of the leading firms in France.
At the age of thirty-seven, Marc wrote a story for the man that his son would grow up to be, called If Only it Were True. His sister, who was a screenwriter at the time and has since turned to directing, encouraged him to send his manuscript to a French publisher, who immediately decided to publish it. Steven Spielberg (Dreamworks) snapped up the film rights to the novel before it was even published. The movie, Just like Heaven, starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, was a number one box office hit in the USA in 2005.
After If Only It Were True, Marc Levy began writing full-time. He has written 25 novels to date. His work has been translated into 50 languages and has sold over 50 million copies worldwide. His latest novel, The Symphony of Monsters, was published in France in October 2023.
Several of his novels have been adapted for the screen. His novel All Those Things We Never Said. (Canal Plus/StarzPlay), starring Jean Reno and directed by Miguel Courtois, was broadcast in July 2022.
Le Figaro newspaper commissioned a nationwide poll asking the French to rank their favourite authors: Marc Levy and Victor Hugo were both ranked first place.
Marc currently lives in New York City and he is a dual French-American national.