David Bellos


David Bellos is an English-born translator and biographer. Bellos is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University in the United States. He was director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication from its inception in 2007 until July 1, 2019.

Biography

Bellos' research topics have included Honoré de Balzac and Georges Perec. Bellos published a translation of Perec's most famous novel, Life A User's Manual, in 1987. 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; the translations were done from previous French translations.
Bellos has written three literary biographies and an introduction to translation studies, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything. His most recent book, The Novel of the Century, tells the story of how Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables.
He appears in The Magnificent Tati, a documentary about the filmmaker Jacques Tati.

Awards and honours

Translations

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