French · 1936–1982
French novelist who joined Oulipo and became its most inventive practitioner. His parents died in World War II—his father in combat, his mother at Auschwitz—and the absence shaped everything. W, or The Memory of Childhood intercuts fictional dystopia with memoir fragments. A Void is a lipogram: three hundred pages without the letter E. Life: A User's Manual imagines an apartment building's inhabitants through elaborate formal constraints. He died of lung cancer at forty-five, leaving work that combines experimental games with genuine grief.