Bernard Clavel

Bernard Clavel was a French novelist from a humble background, born in Lons-le-Saunier in 1923 and dying in La Motte-Servolex in 2010. He wrote in French across the second half of the twentieth century, and his work belongs to the tradition of the regional novel, or roman du terroir. He matters because he made the lives of ordinary working people, and the cause of peace, the subject of serious fiction.

Largely self-taught, he started as a pastry cook's apprentice at fourteen and held a series of jobs before becoming a journalist in the 1950s. After the war he worked for the social insurance service and could not devote himself fully to writing until 1964. His first novel, L'Ouvrier de la nuit, appeared in 1956, and it was the start of a body of around a hundred books, including works for young readers and several multi-volume sagas such as La grande patience, Les Colonnes du ciel and Le Royaume du nord. His prose is plain and focused on modest characters, and he questions violence and war from a humanist standpoint. In 1968 he won the Prix Goncourt for Les Fruits de l'hiver, and from 1971 to 1977 he sat on the Académie Goncourt.

His legacy lies mainly with readers who found in his novels an accessible way of looking at history from below, and in the many film and television adaptations of his books.