Julien Gracq Author

Julien Gracq was born in 1910 in a village of Anjou. As a lieutenant in the French Army he was captured in the fighting round Dunkirk in 1940 but released the following year. A schoolteacher by profession, he taught history and geography for a period in Paris at the Lycée Claude-Bernard while Georges Perec was a pupil there. Julien Gracq (a pen-name) is author of several novels, including Balcony in the Forest, also published by Harvill; describing as it does the "phoney war" preceeding the outbreak of World War II, that novel has a central element in common with The Opposing Shore.