Albert Cohen

Albert Cohen (Corfu, 1895 – Geneva, 1981) was a novelist who wrote in French, born in Greece to a Romaniote Jewish family and later a Swiss citizen. Writing from Geneva, he built a body of fiction and memoir around a single recurring figure, and his novel Belle du Seigneur earned the French Academy's grand prize for fiction.

He was born on Corfu into a family that made soap. When he was a child the business declined amid growing anti-Semitism on the island, and the family resettled in Marseille, where they began trading in eggs and olive oil. He later drew on that period in The Book of My Mother. In Marseille he attended a private Catholic school and formed a lifelong friendship with the future filmmaker Marcel Pagnol. In 1914 he moved to Geneva to study law, and he took Swiss citizenship in 1919.

For much of his life he combined writing with work for international bodies, mainly in Geneva, where he was tied to the League of Nations and to refugee and labour organisations. His literary output came in uneven bursts, with long silences between books. His fiction centres on Solal, a recurring alter ego caught between his Jewish roots and his social standing, and his humour and digressive energy have led critics to compare him with Rabelais.

Some readers prefer Mangeclous, but his reputation rests on Belle du Seigneur, a story of obsessive, destructive passion that won the French Academy's grand prize in 1968. His work is now read as an intimate portrait of Jewish identity in twentieth-century Europe.