Gérard de Cortanze
Gérard de Cortanze (born 22 July 1948 in Paris) is a French writer, essayist, translator and literary critic. He won the Prix Renaudot in 2002 for his historical novel "Assam". He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 2009. Career. He published essays on Paul Auster, J.M.G. Le Clézio, and the history of Surrealism. He collaborated with "Le Figaro Magazine", as well as literary writing and is responsible for the Folio Biographies collection launched by Gallimard in 2005. He translated works of Spanish writers, such as the Mexican Jose Emilio Pacheco, the Nicaraguan Rubén  Darío, Argentine exile in France Juan José Saer, the notebooks of the Spanish painter Antonio Saura (1930–1998), and poems, like those of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo (1892–1938) and the Chilean Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948). He is President of the Jury Prize for the Jean Monnet prize, European department of Charente, awarded annually since 1995, to reward a European writer for a book written or translated into French. The award-winning "Assam" tells the story of Aventino Roero Di Cortanze, an Italian aristocrat at the time of the French invasion of Italy. The first section of the story dramatizes his response to  the invasion and his involvement in the battle scenes, which are perhaps modelled on those in "War and Peace" or "Red Badge of Courage". The second section describes a trip to south Asia under the influence of a friend who is eager to find a way to develop an Indian tea trade within Italy to compete with the tea trade with China that Britain was developing at this time. In the third section, Aventino returns to occupied Italy and must choose between cooperation with the victorious French, joining the Austrians (themselves traditional enemies of his native Piedmont) and the promotion  not only of Italian unity, but also an independent resistance movement or in other words an Italian maquis. This story, a French novel in which the French are the aggressors, naturally raises questions of France's own experience of being invaded by a major continental power in the 20th century.