Pierre Benoit

Pierre Benoit (Albi, 1886 - Ciboure, 1962) was a French novelist and screenwriter and a member of the Académie française. He wrote in French between the two world wars, and his name is linked above all to adventure fiction and to a unsettling kind of femme fatale that readers quickly came to recognise. Today he is remembered mainly for L'Atlantide.

The son of an army supply officer, he spent much of his childhood in North Africa, in Tunisia and Algeria, as his father was posted from one station to another. He studied literature and law at Montpellier, taught at a boarding school and eventually became a state librarian. His first book of poems, from 1914, sold almost nothing. He did far better as a storyteller: after the First World War, from which he emerged ill and demobilised, he published Koenigsmark in 1918 and, the following year, L'Atlantide, which brought him fame and the Grand Prize of the Académie française. His publisher, Albin Michel, stayed with him for the rest of his career.

A keen traveller, he set many novels in distant places, from the Algerian desert to Utah and Cambodia, and he earned part of his living as a freelance foreign correspondent, interviewing the authoritarian leaders of his day. His style blends adventure with a touch of eroticism and produces dominating, dangerous women, almost all with names beginning with A. His monarchist, anglophobic and far-right views drew him towards the pro-Nazi Groupe Collaboration during the occupation. He was arrested in 1944 and spent six months in prison. His books stayed on the collaborationist blacklist for years, until he was rehabilitated with the help of writers such as Louis Aragon. His legacy is more contested than his popularity: he is still read as an adventure novelist, and his work inspired many film adaptations.