Jean-Paul Didierlaurent

Jean-Paul Didierlaurent (1962–2021) was a French novelist and short-story writer from the Vosges. He spent years in a telephone company's customer service department and twice won the Prix Hemingway for his short fiction before his first novel, "The Reader on the 6.27" (Au diable vauvert, 2014; Mantle, 2015), found a wide readership: its narrator works at a book-pulping plant and reads aloud, on the morning train, the pages he has rescued from the machine. "The Rest of Their Lives" followed in English in 2017. He published two further novels in French, the last of them in 2021.