Biography

François-Olivier Rousseau (born 20 September 1947, Boulogne-Billancourt) is a French journalist and writer. A young literary critic at Le Matin de Paris at the end of the 1970s, he became a novelist, met with success immediately and collected several literary prizes. He then left Paris for the Isle of Man where he settled in the capital, Douglas, a town of barely more than 20,000 inhabitants. He devotes himself only to the writing between two voyages. French detesting France, a specialist in the period from Napoleon III to the First World War (which he considers to be "an accident that is incomprehensible to me, I try to understand what could have provoked this manifestation of the death instinct of the West and I like to dream what would have been this century without the war"), he particularly likes to depict with many details the lives of artists going through this era.