David Bellos
David Michael Bellos (25 June 1945 – 26 October 2025) was a British academic, translator and biographer. He was a Princeton University professor of French and comparative literature and, from 2007, the co-founder and first director of its translation and intercultural communication program.
Born in Rochford, England, and educated in nearby Southend-on-Sea, he earned a bachelor’s degree in medieval and modern languages (French and Russian) in 1967 and a DPhil in French literature in 1971, both from Oxford University.
Bellos wrote literary biographies of Romain Gary, Georges Perec and Jacques Tati, and published work on Balzac. His The Novel of the Century explains how Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables. He also wrote introductions to translation studies, including Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything (2011), and Who Owns This Sentence. A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, co-authored with Alexandre Montagu in 2024.
He translated much of Perec into English, including Life: A User's Manual. He won the first Man Booker International Prize for translation in 2005 for Kadare’s works, even though he did not speak Albanian; he translated from existing French translations.
His marriages to Hélène Roth-Laszlo and Susan Lendrum ended in divorce. He later married Pascale Voilley Bellos. He had three children and seven grandchildren, including writer and broadcaster Alex Bellos.
David Bellos died at his vacation home in Doussard, France, on 26 October 2025, at the age of 80.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 06:54 (CET).