David Bellos

David Bellos (born 1945) is an English-born translator and biographer. Bellos is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University in the United States. He is also director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication.

Bellos' research topics have included Balzac and Georges Perec. Bellos published a translation of Perec's most famous novel, Life A User's Manual, in 1987. He won the first Man Booker International Prize for translation in 2005 for his translations of works by Albanian author Ismail Kadare, despite not speaking Albanian; the translations were done from previous French translations.

Bellos has written three literary biographies and an introduction to translation studies, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything (2011). His most recent book, The Novel of the Century, tells the story of how Victor Hugo wrote Les MIsérables.

He appears in The Magnificent Tati, a documentary about the filmmaker Jacques Tati.

He was awarded the rank of Officier in the Ordre national des Arts et des Lettres in 2015.

...
Wikipedia