Michel Déon

Books

Born in Paris in 1919, Michel Déon is the author of more than 50 works of fiction and non-fiction, and a member of the Académie française.

His novel Les Poneys Sauvages (1970) was awarded the prestigious Prix Interallié and in 1973 Le Taxi Mauve (later made into a film starring Fred Astaire and Charlotte Rampling) won the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française. Le Jeune Homme Vert (The Foundling Boy) was published in 1975, with the sequel published two years later.

Déon lives in Ireland with his wife, Chantal, and their horses.

Julian Evans

Books

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.