Nancy Huston was born in Calgary, Canada in 1953. At the age of six, after her mother had left the family, she spent a few months in Germany with her future stepmother and learned to speak German. At fifteen she followed her father and stepmother from Canada to Wilton in
born in Nice in 1969, wrote her PhD thesis in history at the EHESS Paris and received the Körber Fellowship for History and Memory in Europe. She is a founding member of the editorial committee of Dìjiny-Teorie-Kritika (Prague) and, since 2006, leader of the Communist Studies Department (Prague), researcher at
The Syrian writer and activist Mustafa Khalifa was born in 1948 in Jarabulus, near the Turkish border, and grew up in Aleppo. As early as his teenage years, he participated in political acts and was arrested twice. He completed his studies in law in Damascus afterwards. In 1979/1980 and from
The poet Michèle Métail was born in Paris in 1950. She studied German Language and Literature and Sinology and wrote a dissertation on variations in form in classical Chinese verse. Métail from time to time writes poetry using formats taken from other media. In her book ‘Les horizons du sol’
Michael Warschawski was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1949. Since 1965 he has lived in Israel. In 1984 he founded the Israeli-Palestinian Alternative Information Center (AIC), which campaigns for freedom in the Near East. He has been director of the AIC since 1999, which he represents in the International Council
Anthologies with texts by Michel Deguy have already appeared in the USA, Italy, Poland and Hungary but, so far, not in Germany. Here, for some unknown reason, only fragments of his work, now covering a period of over fourty years, can be found scattered in several anthologies on French contemporary
Maylis de Kerangal was born in 1967 in Toulon, France, and studied history, philosophy and ethnology in Rouen and Paris. She subsequently worked for the children’s and young adult literature division of the French publishing house Éditions Gallimard. After a sojourn in the US, she returned to Paris to study
Maryse Condé was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, st1:place>Guadeloupe /st1:place> in 1937. At the age of seventeen, she went to st1:city> st1:place>Paris /st1:place> /st1:city> and studied literature at the Sorbonne. After marrying an actor, she followed him back to his African homeland. There she experienced the first crisis-ridden years of independence, from
Mathias Énard was born in Niort, France, in 1972. He worked towards a university degree in contemporary art before beginning, in 1992, to study Arabic and Persian in Tehran, Egypt, Venice and Damascus. He subsequently taught French in a village in Syria for two years. Until 2010 he taught Arabic
Marion Achard was born in 1976 in Dijon, France. After training as a circus performer at the renowned Académie Fratellini and the Center National des Arts du Cirque, she founded the Compagnie Tour de Cirque with her partner Farid Abed. The troupe performs its self-produced shows in theaters, schools, but
Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers in 1967. She grew up in a southern suburb of Paris, where her mother, a teacher from, had moved to after separating from her Senegalese father. NDiaye is considered to be a »child prodigy of French literature«. Her first novel, a Proustian study of
Marie-Aude Murail was born in Le Havre, France in 1954. She comes from a family of writers and with more than two millions volumes sold, numbers among the most beloved of contemporary children’s and young adults’ authors in her native country. She received a doctorate in new philology from the
