David Bellos

David Bellos (born 1945) is a British academic, translator and biographer.^[1] He is the Meredith Howland Pyne professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University in the United States,^[2] and was director of its translation and intercultural communication programme from 2007 to 2019.^{[citation needed]}

Biography

Bellos has written literary biographies of Romain Gary and Georges Perec, and has published work on Honoré de Balzac; his The Novel of the Century relates the writing of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. He has also written a biography of the filmmaker Jacques Tati, Jacques Tati: His Life and Art, and appeared in The Magnificent Tati, a documentary about him.^{[citation needed]}

Other works include an introduction to translation studies, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything (2011)^[3] and Who Owns This Sentence. A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, written with Alexandre Montagu and published in 2024.

He has translated much of the work of Perec into English, including the novel Life: A User's Manual.

He won the first Man Booker International Prize for translation in 2005 for his translations of works by Albanian author Ismail Kadare, despite not speaking Albanian. His translations were done from previous French translations.^[4]

He is the father of writer and broadcaster Alex Bellos.^[5]

Awards and honours

• 1988 French-American Foundation prize for translation^[2]
• 1994 Prix Goncourt de la Biographie^[2]
• 2005 Man Booker International Prize, for translation of works by Ismail Kadare^[4]
• 2015 Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres^[2]
• 2017 American Library in Paris Book Award winner for The Novel of the Century^[6]
• 2019 Howard T. Berhman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, Princeton University

Publications

Translations

• Georges Perec: Life A User's Manual, 1987 (French-American Foundation's translation prize); new edition, 2008
• Georges Perec: W, or the Memory of Childhood, 1988
• Georges Perec: Things: A Story of the Sixties, 1990
• Georges Perec: 53 Days, 1992
• Ismail Kadare: The Pyramid, 1995
• Ismail Kadare:The File on H, 1996
• Georges Ifrah: A Universal History of Numbers, 2000
• Ismail Kadare: Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, 2001
• Fred Vargas: Have Mercy On Us All, 2003
• Fred Vargas: Seeking Whom He May Devour, 2004
• Ismail Kadare: The Successor, 2005
• Ismail Kadare: Agamemnon's Daughter, 2006
• Ismail Kadare: The Siege, 2008
• Hélène Berr: Journal, 2008
• Georges Perec: Thoughts of Sorts, 2009
• Romain Gary: Hocus Bogus, 2010
• Georges Perec: The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise, 2011
• Georges Simenon: Pietr the Latvian, 2013
• Daniel Anselme: On Leave, 2014
• Ismail Kadare: Twilight of the Eastern Gods, 2014
• Georges Perec: Portrait of a Man, 2014 (UK), 2015 (USA)
• Georges Perec: I Remember, 2014 (USA) (with Philip Terry)
• Paul Fournel, Dear Reader, 2014 (UK)
• Georges Simenon: The Pitards, 2015
• Frédéric Dard, Bird in a Cage2016 (UK)
• Delphine Horvilleur, Anti-Semitism Revisited, 2021 (UK)
• Maxime Rovere, How To Deal With Idiots (and stop being one yourself), 2021 (UK)
• Victor Hugo, Seventeen Ninety-Three, forthcoming 2026 (UK)

Biographies

• Georges Perec. A Life in Words, 1993. (Prix Goncourt de la biographie). French edition, 1994. Japanese edition, 2014. Hebrew edition, 2016. New edition in French, 2022; German translation, 2023; Turkish and Chinese translations in progress.
• Jacques Tati: His Life and Art, 1999. French edition, 2002; Italian edition, 2022. German edition, 2024
• Romain Gary. A Tall Story, Harvill Secker, November 2010

Other books

• Balzac Criticism in France, 1850–1900. The Making of a Reputation. Oxford, 1976
• La Cousine Bette. A Critical Guide. London, 1981
• Old Goriot (Landmarks of World Literature). Cambridge, 1987. Hebrew translation, Tek Aviv, 1990.
• Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. London and New York, 2011. Paperback edition, 2012.
  French translation by Daniel Loayza as Le poisson & le bananier, Flammarion, 2012, republished in 2017 as La Traduction dans tous ses états. Spanish translation by Vicente Campos, as Un Pez en la higuera. Ariel, 2012. German translation by Silvia Morawetz as Was macht der Fisch in meinem Ohr?, Eichborn, 2013. Russian translation by Natalia Shahova, Azbuka, 2019. Traditional Chinese translation, Rye Field, Taipei, 2019. Also translated into Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Persian.
• The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables. London and New York, 2017. Korean edition, 2018. Japanese edition, 2018. Chinese edition, 2019
• Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs. With Alexandre Montagu. London and New York, 2024. Italian edition 2024. Korean edition 2024. Spanish edition 2025.