Célia Bertin (; 22 October 1920 – 27 November 2014) was a French writer, journalist, biographer, French Resistance fighter and winner of the 1953 Prix Renaudot. She was awarded as an Officer of the Legion of Honour, and an Officer of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Biography After her secondary education at the Lycée Fénelon, she obtained a degree in literature at the Sorbonne. She wrote a thesis on the influence of the Russian novel (Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov) on the contemporary English novel (Arnold Bennett to Virginia Woolf).
During World War II, she joined the Resistance, and in 1944 she was sent by the Ministry of Information to Switzerland. After the war, she lived in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Saint-Paul-de-Vence. She published her first novel, The Parade of the wicked, in 1946.
In 1951, she participated in the founding of the literary magazine Roman, with , published in St. Paul de Vence. She moved to Paris in 1953, when she won the Prix Renaudot for The Last Innocence.
She translated articles from English and Italian to French and published numerous articles (in Le Figaro Literature, Arts, and La Revue de Paris).
In 1967, Celia Bertin was invited to be a writer-in-residence at Tufts University in Boston, where she wrote a novel in French titled Je t'appellerai Amérique ["I'll call you, America"] (1972, Editions Grasset). She later married Jerry Reich of New York City and the couple lived in Boston, New Hampshire, Maine and Paris. Jerry Reich, an advertising executive, died in 2010. Bertin died on 27 November 2014, aged 94.
Works 1946: La Parade des impies, Paris, Grasset 1947: La Bague était brisée, Paris, Corrêa 1949: Les Saisons du mélèze, Paris, Corrêa 1953: La Dernière innocence, 1953, Prix Renaudot. English translation by Marjorie Deans, The Last Innocence, New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1955 1954: Contre-champ: roman, Paris, Plon 1957: Une femme heureuse: roman, Paris, Corrêa 1958: Le Temps des femmes, Paris, Hachette 1963: La Comédienne, Paris, Grasset 1967: Mayerling, ou le destin fatal des Wittelsbach, Paris, Perrin 1972: Je t'appellerai Amérique, Paris, B. Grasset 1977: Liens de famille, Paris, B. Grasset 1982: Marie Bonaparte, a life, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1991: Jean Renoir, a Life in Pictures, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1994: Femmes sous l'Occupation, Paris, Stock 1994: Jean Renoir, cinéaste, Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Découvertes Gallimard" nº 209; reissue: Gallimard, 2005, 1999: Marie Bonaparte, la dernière Bonaparte, Paris, Perrin: présentation de Elisabeth Roudinesco 1999: Louise Weiss, Paris, Albin Michel 2005: Femmes sous l'Occupation, Paris, Les Éditions de la Seine 2008: Portrait d'une femme romanesque: Jean Voilier, Paris, Éditions de Fallois 2009: La Femme à Vienne au temps de Freud, Paris, Tallandier
References
External links "Célia Bertin", French wikipedia