Pour en finir avec Victor Hugo

David M. Bellos

Professor, Departments of French and Italian and Comparative Literature

Princeton University

David Bellos gained his doctorate in French literature from Oxford University (UK) and taught subsequently at Edinburgh, Southampton and Manchester before coming to Princeton in 1997. He worked first in nineteenth century studies, particularly on the novel and the history of literary ideas and then developed interests in post-war French writing and film. He is the translator and biographer of Georges Perec and has also written major studies of Jacques Tati and Romain Gary.  A well-known translator, he is also the author of an irreverent introduction to translation studies, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (2011). In 2017, The Novel of the Century. The Amazing Adventure of Les Misérables, marked a return to nineteenth-century studies in a trans-national perspective. His new book, Who owns this sentence? A history of copyrights and wrongs, co-authored with Alexandre Montagu, will appear with Mountain Lion Press in London and W.W. Norton in New York in January 2024. He has a joint appointment in French and Comparative Literature and is also Director of the PIIRS Graduate Fellows Program. He has won the French-American Foundation’s translation prize (1988), the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie (1994), the Man Booker International translator’s award (2005) and the Book Award of the American Library in Paris, and holds the rank of officier in the Orde national des Arts et des Lettres. He was the recipient of the 2019 Howard T. Berhman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.