Georges Perec

Georges Perec was a French novelist and member of the experimental Oulipo group, celebrated for his dazzling formal inventiveness in works such as Life: A User's Manual and the e-less novel A Void, and for the haunting Holocaust memoir-novel W, or the Memory of Childhood.

Georges Perec, orphaned by the Holocaust — his father killed in the war, his mother murdered at Auschwitz — became one of the most inventive writers of the twentieth century and a leading member of the Oulipo, the workshop of writers devoted to constrained and experimental literary forms.

His masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual is an intricate puzzle-novel mapping the inhabitants of a Paris apartment building, while A Void famously omits the letter “e” throughout. In W, or the Memory of Childhood, he braided fragmentary autobiography with a chilling allegory to approach, by indirection, the unspeakable loss of his Holocaust-shadowed childhood.

Perec died in 1982, at forty-five. He is celebrated as a virtuoso of literary form whose playful experiments always served a deep human purpose, and as one of the most original writers in modern French literature.