Ir ne Nemirovsky s own life was as dramatic as any fiction. Dead at 39, author of 16 novels, a biography of Chekhov and many stories, few writers enjoy a posthumous resurgence as astonishing as hers after the international triumph of Suite Fran aise. She was born in 1903 in Kiev to a well-off Jewish family. The authors of this fascinating biography have had access to previously unpublished documents and to surviving family members in Russia, researching her childhood in the Ukraine, and tracing her odyssey first to St Petersburg, where her father was a successful financier, and then, as the family was forced to flee the Russian Revolution, to Finland, Sweden and finally France in 1919. They settled in Paris, and in 1926 she married another Jewish emigre, Michel Epstein. With the publication of David Golder in 1929 delivered to a publisher just before the birth of her first daughter, Ir ne swiftly became an acclaimed and successful writer. Her biographers, (who had access to all her writing diaries) examine in detail the way she used her life in her fiction, from pogroms in Ukraine to gilded holidays in Biarritz, and especially the troubled relationship with her capitalist fathe

Author Biography

Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt are the authors of an acclaimed biography of Roger Stephane. For this biography of Nemirovsky they have had unprecedented access to unpublished letters, notebooks and archives.