David Bellos

David Bellos has published over 25 books, many but not all of them translations. He has won the French-American Foundation's translation prize (1988) for his translation of Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie (1994), and the Man Booker International translator's award (2005) for his translations of Ismail Kadare. He has also translated works by Fred Vargas, Helene Berr, Georges Ifrah and Romain Gary, and written biographies of Gary and Jacques Tati.

Having taught at Southampton, Edinburgh and Oxford Universities, he moved to Princeton in 1997 where he worked first in nineteenth century studies, then modern and contemporary French writing, as the translator and then the biographer of Georges Perec. He now has a joint appointment at Princeton in French and Comparative Literature and is also Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication.

His most recent book Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs was co-authored with Alexandre Montagu and published in 2024 by Headline (UK) and Norton (US).