The Vatican Cellars

André Gide

Books

The Vatican Cellars

André Gide (1869–1951) was a giant of twentieth-century French literature. An innovator of the novelistic form, he undertook a life-long exploration of morality in his work, and was a major influence on the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Besides fiction, Gide’s oeuvre encompassed travel writing, essays, plays, poetry and autobiographical works. Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.

After a strict Protestant upbringing, Gide went on to question organised religion. He travelled widely, and was critical of many of the colonial practices he encountered. It was while in North Africa that he befriended Oscar Wilde.

The Vatican Cellars was written at the midpoint of Gide’s career and provoked scandal at the time of publication for its mockery of the Church and supposed amorality. It has not been widely available in the UK for 25 years.

Julian Evans

Books

The Foundling Boy

The Vatican Cellars

Julian Evans grew up on Australia’s east coast and in the south London suburbs in the 1960s. In 1990 he left his job in London to island-hop across the Pacific Ocean by ship, small plane and boat, a journey that ended five months later at a US nuclear-missile test range at Kwajalein atoll. The book that resulted, Transit of Venus, has been described as “far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times”. His second book is Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis (Jonathan Cape, Picador). He has also written and presented radio and television documentaries and writes for English and French newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and L’Atelier du Roman. He is a recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française from the Académie Française and lives in London with the artist Natasha Dikaya and their two children.