Jean
Rouaud

Jean Rouaud was born in Campbon, at the Loire estuary, in 1952 and grew up in a lower middle-class merchant’s family. After finishing his literature studies in Nantes he moved to Paris in the eighties, and worked among other things as a fireman, journalist, publisher’s representative and co-proprietor of a kiosk. In 1990 he published the bestseller »Les Champs d’honneur« (Eng. »Fields of Glory«, 1992), for which he was awarded the Prix Goncourt. The autobiographical family novel describes life in the French provinces at the outbreak of World War I. The work signals the brilliant prelude to a five-volume cycle, which mirrors twentieth-century France in the fate of three generations of the author’s family. All books in the cycle have been translated into German, and three of them into English.