Victor Hugo (1802-1885), novelist, poet, playwright, and politician, is widely considered one of greatest French Romantic writers. He is best known for two of today’s most popular world classics: Les Misérables (1862) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). Over a writing career spanning sixty years, he wrote dozens of acclaimed works, including The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829), Les Contemplations (1856), The Toilers of the Sea (1866), and The Man Who Laughs (1869).
Julie Rose (translator) is an acclaimed translator of French who has translated more than sixty books and plays, and many essays, in a career long dedicated to translating some of France’s greatest writers, both classic and contemporary: from Jean Racine, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas père, and Émile Zola to modern cultural critics Paul Virilio, Jacques Rancière, Hubert Damisch, Bruno Latour, Chantal Thomas, Simon Leys biographer Philippe Paquet, and many more. She is best known for a celebrated translation of Hugo’s Les Misérables (2008). In 2016 she was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
