| Alain Defossé | |
| Birth Date: | 11 February 1957 |
| Birth Place: | Nantes, France |
| Death Place: | Paris, France |
| Occupation: | Novelist, translator |
| Alma Mater: | Cours Florent |
Alain Defossé (11 February 1957 – 14 May 2017) was a French novelist and translator.
Alain Defossé was born on 11 February 1957 in Nantes.[1] [2] [3] Early on, he was interested in music, jazz in particular, and also cinema, and he studied at the Cours Florent in Paris.[2] [4]
Defossé authored nine novels. His first novel, Les fourmis d'Anvers, was published in 1991.[2] He also translated several books from English into French.[2] For example, he translated Crazy Cock by Henry Miller in 1990.[2] He also translated American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis in 1993.[2] In 2006, he translated The Night Watch by Sarah Waters.[2] Two years later, in 2008, he translated Rant by Chuck Palahniuk.[2] Other novelists whose work he translated are Irvine Welsh and Joseph Connolly.[3]
In his books L'Homme en habit [The Man in Clothes] and On ne tue pas les gens [We Don't Kill People], Defossé discusses his homosexuality, telling an interviewer in 2015: "my books are, generally speaking, made up of disparate elements that I have kept, consciously or not, in a secret drawer and which, at a certain moment, reappear and aggregate until they form a story and a book ... in my novels, there are also a lot of ghosts, which are certainly my ghosts, but which are also ghosts which belong only to themselves".[4]
Defossé died on 14 May 2017 in Paris.[2] [3]