The Origin of the World

About the Author and the Translator

PIERRE MICHON was born in Creuse, France, in 1945. His first work of fiction was published in 1984, and since that time his reputation as one of the foremost contemporary French writers has become well established. He has won many prizes, including the Prix France Culture for his first book, Small Lives; the Prix Louis Guilloux for the French edition of The Origin of the World; and the Prix de la Ville de Paris in 1996 for his body of work. He has also received the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française for his novel The Eleven, the Grand Prix Société des gens de lettres de France (SGDL) for Lifetime Achievement in 2004, and the Prix Décembre (2002) and Petrarca-Preis (2010).

WYATT MASON, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper’s, has translated writing by Pierre Michon, Éric Chevillard, Michel de Montaigne, and Arthur Rimbaud. He teaches at Bard College.

ROGER SHATTUCK (1923–2005) was one of America’s preeminent critics, an authority on French letters whose first book, The Banquet Years (1955), on the birth of the avant-garde in France at the turn of the century, has never gone out of print. A frequent writer on French literature for the New York Review of Books, Shattuck won the National Book Award in 1977 for Marcel Proust.