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Eli Anderson
Eli Anderson (whose real name is Thierry Serfaty) started off as a young doctor whose medical studies took him from France to Denmark and Canada. He interned in child psychiatrics and pediatric oncology, and wrote his doctoral dissertation in pediatric psychology on the significance of illness for children. During his research, he asked his young patients to draw “sickness.” The results were so astonishing that he decided he wanted to do something to help children be less afraid of their own bodies. During this time, his experience working with children and writing lead him to mix his imagination with his knowledge, his curiosity with his experience, and he started to write Oscar Pill. |
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Antoine Audouard
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. |
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Jean-Dominique Bauby
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. |
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Ingrid Betancourt
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. |
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François Bizot
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. |
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Stephen Clarke
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. |
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Zlata Filipovic
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. |
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Michèle Fitoussi
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. |
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Marie de Hennezel
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. |
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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. |
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Duong Thu Huong
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. |
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Rustam Ibragimbekov
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. |
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Clara Kramer
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. |
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Wendy Law-Yone
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. |
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Frédéric Lenoir
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. |
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Marc Levy
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. |
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Somaly Mam
"The perfect counterpoint to fatalism is Somaly Mam, one of the bravest and boldest..." - Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times |
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Philippe Presles
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 Prévenir (Robert Laffont, 2006) and holds an MBA from HEC Business School. |
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José Manuel Prieto
José Manuel Prieto was born in Havana, Cuba. After finishing high school, he left Havana for Russia and eventually lived in Saint Petersburg. Now living in New York and teaching at Cornell, Prieto has written short stories, travel accounts, and (highly commended) novels. |
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Michel Quint
Michel Quint was born in France in 1949. A French literature and theatre studies teacher he is also the author of several short stories and crime novels. In 1989 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for his novel Billard à l’étage. Effroyables Jardins, his novel inspired by his own father’s life story, became a huge bestseller in France at its publication in 2000. Translated into 15 languages, it has been adapted several times for the theatre. The film adaptation was directed by Jean Becker. |
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Alan Riding
Alan Riding was born in Brazil to British parents and was educated in Britain as an economist and a lawyer. Eventually he opted for a career in journalism, moving from London to New York with Reuters and then to Mexico with The Financial Times. In Mexico, Riding joined The New York Times and remained with the paper for 30 years. |
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Adam Ross
Adam Ross was born and raised in New York City. A child actor, he has appeared in movies, commercials, and television shows. He graduated with departmental honors in English from Vassar College and holds an M.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and Washington University respectively, where he studied with Richard Dillard, Stanley Elkin, and William Gass. |
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Marcel Rufo
Marcel Rufo is head of child psychiatry at the Sainte-Marguerite hospital in Marseille and a respected specialist in the field of infant and adolescent psychology. |
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David Servan-Schreiber
David Servan-Schreiber, is a French-born psychiatrist and neuroscientist who is clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and cofounded the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. |
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Sophie van der Stap
Sophie van der Stap was 21 years old when she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. The Girl with the Nine Wigs, her fresh and candid account of the illness, was a best-seller in Holland. |
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Danielle Thiéry
Danielle Thiéry, one of France’s highest-ranking police officers, was the first woman in France to be appointed to the post of Police Commissioner. Since 1997, she has devoted her spare time to writing, directly inspired by the investigations that she has led, developing a television series, an autobiographical novel (Prix Bourgogne), and eight thrillers (Prix Polar). |
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Rajesh Thind
Rajesh Thind is 35 years old. He’s a writer, producer and director; he’s written for The Independent, Time Out, Vertigo and Diplo magazine and made films for Channel 4, the BBC, ITV, Al-Jazeera International, and the Arts Council of England. He graduated from Manchester University and Goldsmiths College, where he has also tutored. He is currently living in India working on the book and documentary film of The Family Farm: Twelve Acres in the Punjab. |
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Tzvetan Todorov
An essayist, historian and philosopher of world renown, Tzvetan Todorov has taught at universities in the United States and France's Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, where he was a Director of Research. He is the author of many books, including In Defence of the Enlightenment, Hope and Memory, The New World Disorder, and the The Apostles of Beauty. |
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Miklós Vámos
Miklós Vámos is a Hungarian writer, who has published 28 books. He has been correspondent for The Washington Post and The Nation and taught at Yale; he has also written short stories, plays and film scripts; but as the author of eleven novels, he feels that he was born to be a novelist. |
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Michael Wallner
Michael Wallner was born in Graz, Austria, in 1958. He has worked as an actor and screenwriter. He divides his time between Berlin and the Black Forest and is the author of 6 novels. |
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