Alain Robbe-Grillet

One of the most controversial and influential writers of the twentieth century, Alain Robbe-Grillet, godfather of the nouveau roman, changed the main direction of the literary novel towards a new subjective approach to life. Born in Brest in 1922, he worked as an agricultural engineer, mainly in Africa, before becoming a novelist, essayist, scenarist, and director of his own films.

The Erasers, first published in 1953,attacked the rationality of post-war French literature. Roland Barthes noted: "Robbe-Grillet requires only one mode of perception: the sense of sight. For him the object is merely the occasion of a certain optical resistance. The object has no being beyond phenomenon."

Robbe-Grillet has apparently written twelve novels, which include The Voyeur,

Jealousy, In the Labyrinth, The House of Assignation, Project for a Revolution in New York, Recollections of the Golden Triangle, Djinn, and Recovery published last year.  

The cult films Last Year at Marienbad, The Immortal One, and The Trans-European Express  are taken from Robbe-Grillet’s ten cine-novels.

His essays Towards a New Novel, short stories Snapshots, and autobiography Ghosts in the Mirror are seminal works in the literary history of our time.

Alain Robbe-Grillet lives in Paris.