Jean-Marie Laclavetine was born in Bordeaux in 1954. A novelist and short story writer (winner of, among other awards, the Goncourt des Lycéens in 1999 for Première ligne and the Grand Prix de la Nouvelle from the French Academy for Le Rouge et le Blanc), he has been a member of the reading committee at Éditions Gallimard since 1989. In this capacity, he has published various French-speaking writers (Jean-Christophe Rufin, Carole Martinez, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Muriel Barbery, Boualem Sansal, Dai Sijie, David Foenkinos, Tristan Garcia, Leïla Slimani, Joffrine Donnadieu, Akira Mizubayashi, etc.). Together with the team at the André-Malraux Center in Sarajevo, he contributed for twenty years to organizing the European Book Meetings of Sarajevo every year in Bosnia. He is also a translator of Italian. His two most recent books, Une amie de la famille (Marguerite Duras Prize) and La vie des morts, were published by Gallimard in 2019 and 2021.