Born in Madagascar and raised in France, Claude Simon (1913-2005) served in the French Resistance during the Second World War and went on to become one of the leading exponents of the Nouveau Roman, a 1950s movement advocating formal experimentation in fiction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985.
His imagination, working through the controlled riot of words, flames and flares magnificently, and nowhere is he better than in conveying the sense of disintegration that overtook the French in 1940. * The Times *