French · 1895–1970
French novelist who made Provence into a literary territory. Born in Manosque, where he lived nearly his whole life, Giono worked as a bank clerk while writing novels that celebrated peasant life against industrial modernity. His early trilogy—Hill, Harvest, Song of the World—established his pastoral vision. The Horseman on the Roof brought him popular success with its romantic adventure set during a cholera epidemic. A pacifist in both wars, he was briefly imprisoned at the start of World War II and shunned afterward. The prose moves through landscape like wind.