Josée Kamoun was born Piazza in 1951 in Tunis (Tunisia). She studied at the Sorbonne (Paris IV and Paris III), passed her agrégation in English in 1975 and her doctorate in literature - on Henry James, ‘Language and representation in four novels’ - in 1982. Between the two, she obtained a Licence in Social Anthropology at Paris V in 1978. She taught until 2003, before becoming General Inspector of the French Ministry of Education until 2012. Since then, she has devoted herself exclusively to translation (Jonathan Coe, Richard Ford, John Irving, Philip Roth, etc.), for which she has received several prizes and awards. Her Dictionnaire amoureux de la traduction, published by Plon in 2024, has been a resounding success far beyond the world of translation.