An Inconvenient Place

About the Author

Jonathan Littell was born in New York, and grew up in France. He now lives in Spain. His best-known novel, The Kindly Ones, was originally published in French in August 2006, and won the most prestigious literary prize in France, the Prix Goncourt, as well as the Académie Française's Grand Prix de Littérature. He has since published books on Chechnya, Syria, Francis Bacon, as well as a novel and several novellas. He has written for Le Monde, the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

Antoine d'Agata is a French photographer born in Marseille in 1961. He studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York City, under the tutelage of Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. D'Agata joined Magnum Photos in 2004. He has published more than a dozen books, and directed three films.

Charlotte Mandell has translated over fifty books of fiction, poetry and philosophy from French, including works by Marcel Proust, Maurice Blanchot, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jean-Luc Nancy, and the majority of Jonathan Littell's work, including The Kindly Ones. Her translation of Compass by Mathias Énard was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and was the recipient of the 2018 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She was recently named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has received the Thornton Wilder Translation Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.