David Bellos

Who is David Bellos?

David Bellos is an English-born translator and biographer. Bellos currently teaches French and Comparative literature at Princeton University in the United States. He is also director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication.

Bellos' research topics have included Balzac and Georges Perec. Bellos published an award-winning translation of Perec's most famous novel, Life A User's Manual, in 1987. He won the first Man Booker International Prize for translation in 2005 for his translations of works by Albanian author Ismail Kadare, despite not speaking Albanian; the translations were done from previous French translations.

Bellos has written a number of award-winning literary biographies and an introduction to translation studies, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything.

He appears in The Magnificent Tati, a documentary about the filmmaker Jacques Tati.