David Foenkinos

Foenkinos wrote Delicacy, a short novel about a widow and the unremarkable colleague she unexpectedly falls for, and then filmed it himself with Audrey Tautou. Charlotte is a different thing altogether: a life of the painter Charlotte Salomon, who made a thousand gouaches recording her family before being killed at Auschwitz while pregnant, told in single-line paragraphs, a form he has said the material forced on him. He was a jazz guitarist and teacher first, and few living French novelists are translated more often.