Georges Perec (born March 7, 1936) – French novelist, poet, essayist – La Disparition (The Void) (1969)
Read The Authors Calendar biography of Georges Perec
Read about Perec's connection to the art world here
Perec’s masterful books are characterized by linguistic trickery and self-imposed constrictions, his most audacious being the 1964 novel La disparition (translated in 1994 as A Void), which runs for about 300 pages without ever using an “e”—the most common letter in the French language. (Last year, to mark Perec’s 80th birthday, Google France’s homepage dropped the “e” from the company’s logo.)
Perec was affiliated with a coterie of writers and mathematicians who formed the group OULIPO, inventing axioms as directives for experimentation with word games. But his work, albeit linguistically titillating, is often tinged with melancholy. Born in mid-1930s Paris to Polish-Jewish immigrants, Perec lost both his parents at a young age. His father died as a soldier in World War II, and his mother was later deported by the Nazis, and is assumed to have perished in Auschwitz around 1943. His semi-autobiographical W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975) charts the blurry uncertainty of his memories of his parents.
Watch Rencontres avec Georges Perec
here
Watch a review of Georges Perec's novel, Life: A User’s Manual
here
Muhsin Al-Ramli (Arabic: محسن الرملي; (born March 7, 1967) Iraqi scholar, translator, novelist, poet – Scattered Crumbs (2000)
Read about Muhsin al Ramli here
An Arabic website about Muhsin al Ramli here
Al Ramli describes the terrible events that inspired his novel
The President's Garden
here
Watch an interview with Muhsin al Ramli (in Spanish)
here
Robin Becker (born March 7, 1951) U.S. poet – Domain of Perfect Affection (2006)
Robin Becker reads her poem Shopping
here