Jean Blot


Alexandre Blokh, called Jean Blot, was a French writer, translator, and senior civil servant of Russian origin.

Biography

Blot came from two bourgeois families. In the USSR of the twenties, his parents worked at the defense commissioner for his father, as a lawyer for street children for his mother. His family moved to Germany at the time of the NEP, then moved to Paris where he attended primary school. Sent to England to learn English for high school, he spent the war in France. A Russian and Jewish refugee, he fled to Lyon and engaged in the Resistance. He was a doctor of Law, Bachelor of Arts, International Civil Servant at the United Nations in New York, in Geneva then at the UNESCO in Paris. He travelled all over the world. International Secretary of the PEN club from 1981 to 1997 and then International Vice President of Pen Club since 1998 and President of the French Pen club from 1999 to 2005. In 1990 he created the Russian Pen club. He was a novelist but also a literary critic in relation to his trilingualism.

Works

devoted five programs to him in 2012.