Patrick McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Anne's College. Born in Tunisia and raised in Belgium, he is a poet, novelist and translator. His novel The Last Hundred Days was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award, and his second novel, Throw me to the Wolves, won the 2020 Encore Award.
His other books include three collections of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004), Jilted City (2010), Blood Feather (2023) and a memoir, Other People's Countries (2015), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. He was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2011, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
David Bellos is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature at Princeton University, where he also teaches Comparative Literature.
He is the author of many books and articles on nineteenth-century fiction, alongside biographies of three icons of French culture in the twentieth century: Georges Perec, Jacques Tati and Romain Gary. He is also a well-known translator and the author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? The Amazing Adventure of Translation. David Bellos was recently awarded the rank of officier in the Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres for his services to French culture.