Katherine Pancol

Katherine Pancol
Katherine Pancol at a book fair in Paris, France, in March 2009
Born	(1954-10-22) 22 October 1954 (age 62) Casablanca, Morocco
Occupation	Journalist, Novelist

Katherine Pancol (born 22 October 1954) is a journalist and bestselling French novelist. Her books have been translated into some 30 languages, and sold millions of copies worldwide. In the United States, she is known as the author of The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles (Penguin, 2013). Its sequel, The Slow Waltz of Turtles, is due out in 2016.

Katherine Pancol moved from Casablanca to France when she was five. She studied literature and initially became a French and Latin teacher before turning to journalism. While working for Paris-Match and Cosmopolitan, she was noticed by an intuitive publisher who encouraged her to begin writing fiction. Following the success of her first novel Moi D'abord in 1979, Pancol moved to New York City where she spent the next decade pursuing creative writing and screenwriting classes at Columbia University while producing three more novels La Barbare in 1981, Scarlett, si possible and Les Hommes cruels ne courent pas les rues.

Influenced by the American way of life, her style became more fast paced and eventful.

Pancol is admired for her insights into human psychology, particularly women, and her sense of detail is often shaded with wry humor. Her works tend to have an uplifting theme while entertaining, and have been immensely successful commercially. One of her goals is to inspire women to dare to be themselves while keeping a positive relationship with life itself.

Published in 2006, her novel Les Yeux jaunes des crocodiles (The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles) was a huge success in France, where it sold more than one million copies and received the "Prix de Maison de la Presse, 2006" for the largest distribution in France. Katherine Pancol was awarded "Best author 2007" by Gorodets Publishing (Moscow). Crocodiles was the 6th best-selling book in France in 2008 (Le Figaro littéraire). It was translated into English by William Rodarmor and "Helen Dickinson" (pseud.) and published by Penguin Books in 2013. It has also been translated into Russian, Chinese, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, Korean, Vietnamese, Latvian, Czech, Slovak, Hebrew and Norwegian. It was adapted into the 2014 film Les Yeux jaunes des crocodiles starring Julie Depardieu and Emmanuelle Béart. The second book in the trilogy, The Slow Waltz of Turtles, has been translated by William Rodarmor and will be published by Penguin in 2016.