Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969.  The daughter of a political opponent of the Somali dictatorship, Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up surrounded by her family in exile. Her traditional Muslim upbringing continued from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, then to Ethiopia and Kenya.

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.

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.

In the summer of 2001, Mourad Benchellali was 19. He was born and raised in France, and had rarely travelled outside the country. He lived and worked in a suburb of Lyon, and he was engaged to his girlfriend, whom he planned to marry that year. He was a ‘quiet’ Muslim, and there was nothing wrong with his life except for its routine; a routine that was confined to the streets and buildings of his neighborhood, a routine he had lived for so many years he had no notion of life elsewhere. So when his elder brother began to speak to him of travel and adventure, he listened.

Ingrid Betancourt’s story – her exemplary courage, spirit and resilience – has captured the world’s imagination. Held captive by the FARC in the depths of the Colombian jungle for six and a half years, she was freed on July 2nd 2008.

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.

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.

André Comte-Sponville is one of France’s preeminent contemporary philosophers.

Zlata Filipovic was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1980. 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.

Michèle Fitoussi has worked for the past twenty-five years at Elle magazine. Her journalism has often focussed on the challenges facing women and was the co-author of The Prisoner, about a young Moroccan woman imprisoned with her family for twenty years under the reign of Hassan II, was an international bestseller. She is also a screenwriter and novelist.

The latest book by the author of the international best-seller Intimate Death is quickly climbing the French bestseller lists. In The Warmth of the Heart Keeps the Body From Rusting, Marie de Hennezel’s makes full use of her experience as a psychologist to look at how we can all develop a personal “art of growing old”, avoiding the psychological pitfalls of ageing.

Duong Thu Huong was born in the Thai Binh province of North Vietnam in 1947. At the age of twenty, she led a Communist Theatrical Youth Brigade sent to the front during the Vietnam War to support the troops’ morale. She was an active patriot in her youth, foregoing an offer to study abroad in favor of serving her country. She was shocked to discover that the “American war” was also a civil war.

Rustam Ibragimbekov was born in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1939. He is an internationally renowned and multi-award winning screenwriter, dramatist and producer. In 2000, he was made a ‘Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’, one of France’s most prestigious cultural awards. His writing credits include more than 40 film and television scripts, plays and prose. In 1994, Burnt by the Sun was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes and an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. A stage version of Burnt by the Sun, adapted by playwright and script writer Peter Flannery (Our Friends in the North, The Devil’s Whore) opened at the National Theatre in London in March this year.

Clara (Schwarz) Kramer was born in 1927, in Zolkiew, a town in the Galicia section of Poland (currently a part of the Ukraine).  In an attempt to escape the Germans in 1941, fifteen year old Clara and her family were joined by several other families as they hid together in an underground bunker.  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. 

Wendy Law-Yone is the author of The Road to Wanting, Irrawaddy Tango, and The Coffin Tree. Her short stories have appeared in Grand Street and anthologies of erotica, and her book reviews and articles in The Washington Post,  Atlantic Monthly, Architectural Digest, and Time Magazine.

Frédéric Lenoir is a writer, philosopher and specialist in religions.  He is the editor in chief of Le monde des religions and the author of numerous best-selling non-fiction books. He has been working on The Oracle of the Moon for the past 15 years.

Marc was born on October 16, 1961 in France. At the age of eighteen, he joined the Red Cross and within three years was appointed Regional Director of the Western Paris Department of Emergency Relief.