Anne F. Garréta is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after the founding of the Oulipo. A normalienne (graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure) and lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Garréta was co-opted into the Oulipo in April 2000. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx hailed by critics in France and the US alike, tells a love story between two people without giving any indication of grammatical gender for the narrator or the narrator’s love interest. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994 and again in May 2000, which led to her joining the Oulipo. She won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002 for this novel, Not One Day, awarded each year to an author whose "fame does not yet match their talent" (she is the second Oulipian to win the award--Georges Perec won in 1978).
Emma Ramadan is a graduate of Brown University, received her Master’s in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris, and recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship for literary translation in Morocco. Her translation of Anne Garreta’s
Sphinx was published by Deep Vellum in spring 2015 and was nominated for both the PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award. Her translation of Anne Parian’s prose poem
Monospace was released by La Presse in fall 2015, and her translation of Fouad Laroui’s Prix Goncourt story collection
The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers was published in spring 2016. Her forthcoming translations of Laroui’s debut novel in English
The Tribulations of the Last Sjilmassi, and Brice Matthiuessent’s
Revenge of the Translator will be published by Deep Vellum in 2017.