The American Library in Paris Writers Council

 

Pierre Assouline, journalist and author, was born in Casablanca, Morocco. He has written biographies of figures such as Marcel Dassault, Georges Simenon and Gaston Gallimard. He also hosts radio programs on France-Culture and has written countless articles on literature and culture. For more than a decade and a half he has taught courses in writing and investigative journalism at Sciences-Po. Assouline has been a member of the Goncourt Academy since 2012, and writes a popular French-language blog about literature called La République des Livres.

 

 

Laura Auricchio, an art historian by training and a dean at the New School in New York, is the author of , Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, as well as The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered – published in the fall of 2014, and winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award in 2015.

 

 

 

Julian Barnes is the author of eleven novels. Flaubert’s Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and his latest, The Sense of an Ending, won the Man Booker Prize. In France he has also won the Prix Medicis and the Prix Femina. The son of two teachers of French, he is also the author of short stories (Cross Channel, Pulse) and essays (Something to Declare, Through the Window). He has been a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary and London correspondent of The New Yorker. He was born in Leicester, England, in 1946, and educated at Oxford University.

 

 

Antony Beevor is the critically-acclaimed author of books on the liberation of Paris, the fall of Berlin, the battle of Stalingrad, and the Normandy landings, and most recently the sweeping The Second World War, an international bestseller.

 

 

 

Christopher Buckley is an American novelist and satirist known for his Washington novels, including The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, No Way to Treat a First Lady, Florence of Arabia, and Boomsday, as well as for comic essays in The New Yorker and elsewhere. His memoir Losing Mum and Pup is about his parents, William F. Buckley, Jr., and wife Patricia. Born in 1952, Buckley graduated from Yale University and worked as managing editor of Esquire, chief speechwriter for Vice President George H. W. Bush,                          and editor in chief of Forbes FYI.

 

 

Laurent de Brunhoff, born in Paris in 1925, carried on the work of his father, Jean de Brunhoff, as the artist and author of the Babar books after World War II. In more than fifty books, as well as in films and television programs with which he has been associated, de Brunhoff has made the King of the Elephants and his family beloved figures to generations around the world. He lives in New York and Key West with his wife and Babar collaborator, the author Phyllis Rose.

 

 

Michael Chabon is one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. His first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was written as a PhD thesis, submitted to a publisher by his professor without his knowledge, drew a six-figure advance and catapulted him to literary celebrity when he was 25. His succeeding and each quite different novels include Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2001, Summerland, The Final Solution, Gentlemen of the Road, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and most recently, Telegraph Avenue.

 

 

Sebastian Faulks is the author of Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, and The Girl at the Lion d’Or, his French Trilogy, and of six other novels, a triple biography (The Fatal Englishman) and a book of literary parodies, Pistache. His Faulks on Fiction is a book of essays based on his acclaimed BBC television series about significant characters in major English novels. Faulks was born in 1953 in Donnington, Berkshire. After high school, and before the University of Cambridge, he spent a year studying in Paris and was a member of the American Library in Paris.

 

 

Laura Furman, born in 1945, is the author of three collections of stories, two novels, and a memoir. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Dobie Paisano Project, Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. In 2010, she taught at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3. She is editor of the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories series and is a professor emeritus in the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin.

 

 

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1986. His work for the magazine has won him the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism as well as the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. His articles about his life in Paris from 1995 to 2000 were the basis of his best-selling book, Paris to the Moon. Gopnik is also the author of Through the Children’s Gate and The King in the Window and the editor of Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology. Born in Philadelphia in 1956 and raised in Montreal, he is a graduate of McGill University.

 

 

Robert Harris studied English Literature at Cambridge;  he began his career in non-fiction as a journalist—political editor at The Observer– and reporter for BBC television.   His first writing was investigative non-fiction, and he has used those skills in gripping works of fiction that have become best sellers: Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, The Ghost, Lustrum and The Fear Index. His book An Officer and A Spy won The American Library in Paris 2014 Book Award.

 

 

John Irving, born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, is the author of fifteen novels, including The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Widow for One Year, In One Person, and Avenue of Mysteries.

 

 

Diane Johnson, Chairman, born in 1934, is a novelist (Lulu in Marrakesh, L’Affaire, Le Mariage, Le Divorce, and other novels); essayist (Into a Paris Quartier), and biographer (Dashiell Hammett: A Life). With Stanley Kubrick, Johnson co-authored the award-winning screen adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. She contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books. Johnson, chairman of the Library Writers Council, divides her time between Paris and San Francisco.

 

 

Alice Kaplan, born in 1954, is author of The Collaborator, The Interpreter, French Lessons: A Memoir, and, most recently, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. Kaplan is also translator into English of Louis Guilloux’s novel OK, Joe, Evelyne Bloch-Dano’s Madame Proust: A Biography, and three books by Roger Grenier: Piano Music for Four Hands, Another November, and The Difficulty of Being a Dog. She is the John M. Musser Professor of French and chair of the Department of French at Yale University.

 

 

Ethan Katz is both a historian and an author, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Cincinnati. His first book, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France won the American Library in Paris Book Award in 2016.

 

 

Philippe Labro, born in Montauban, France, 1936, is the author of seventeen books of fiction and nonfiction, including L’Étudiant Etranger, based on his year of study at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, Le Petit Garcon, and most recently, 7500 Singes. He has directed motion pictures, composed popular lyrics, written for magazines and newspapers, and served as a radio and television executive. In 2010, he became Commander of the Légion d’Honneur.

 

 

Fredrick Logevall, born in 1963 in Stockholm, Sweden, is John S. Knight Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, where he is also vice provost for international affairs and director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. His book, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam(Random House, 2012), received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2013 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and the first American Library in Paris Book Award, among other awards. Logevall also serves as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).

 

 

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 100 books of fiction and nonfiction, many of them nominated for and winners of major literary prizes.  With Shuddering Fall, her first novel, was published in 1963.  The Falls, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, We Were the Mulvaneys, A Garden of Earthly Delights, them, and Mudwoman are among her best-known novels.

 

 

Robert Paxton is an American historian specializing in Vichy France and Europe during the World War II era. Paxton is best known for his 1972 book Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, In which he argued that Vichy collaboration with Germany was a voluntary program entered into by the Vichy government, not forced upon it by German pressure.

 

 

Bruno Racine is the author of ten works of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are Google et le nouveau monde; Adieu à l’Italie; and a memoir, La voix de ma mère. A longtime French civil servant and member of the Cour des Comptes, he has served as director of cultural affairs of the city of Paris, director of the French Academy in Rome, president of the Pompidou Center, and president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

 

 

Stacy Schiff is a leading American biographer whose books have been honored with prizes and critical acclaim, and equally honored by a wide, discerning and enthusiastic readership. Schiff’s most recent book is The Witches: Salem, 1692. Born in 1960, Schiff is a graduate of Phillips Academy and Williams College. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and many other publications.

 

 

Lily Tuck, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The News from Paraguay, is also the author of three other novels, Interviewing Matisse, The Woman Who Walked on Water, and I Married You for Happiness. She is also the author of a biography, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. Tuck was born in Paris in 1938 and lives in New York.

 

 

Scott Turow, born in Chicago in 1949, is the author of erudite legal mysteries, bracketed by his first novel, Presumed Innocent (1987), and its sequel, Innocent (2010). His fiction has been translated into 25 languages and has been adapted into a full-length film and two television miniseries. Long before, as a Harvard Law School student, he wrote a classic account of the first-year experience, One L. He has continued to practice law in Chicago while writing about such topics as the death penalty, official corruption, intellectual freedom, and Chicago politics. He is serving for the second time as president of the Authors Guild and is a leading advocate for the rights of authors in the digital age.

 

 

Ayelet Waldman is the author of the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,  which was adapted into a film called The Other Woman, starring Natalie Portman. Waldman is best known for her controversial New York Times nonfiction bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace. A graduate of Wesleyan University and George Washington University Law School, Waldman was a public defender before turning to a writing career, first as the author of a series called “Mommy-Track Mysteries.”