David PlanteDavid Plante grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, within a French-Canadian parish that was palisaded by its language, a French that dated from the time of the first French colonists in the early 17th Century to what was then most of North America, laNouvelle France. His background was very similar to that of Jack Kerouac, who was brought up in a French speaking parish in Lowell, Massachusetts. Plante has been inspired to write novels rooted in La Nouvelle France, most notably in The Family, a contender for the National Book Award.As a young man, Plante moved to London, where he lived for some fifty years, years in part accounted for in his memoirs Becoming a Londoner and Worlds Apart and in The Pure Lover, an elegy to his forty-year relationship with Nikos Stangos. He has published a number of novels, some referring back to his parish but also expanding into European and Russian settings. He has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker with short stories and profiles of people he knew, including the painter Francis Bacon, the aesthete Harold Acton, and the historian Steven Runciman. His renowned book, Difficult Women, a non-fiction work that profiled Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer will be reissued by The New York Review of Books Press 2017He has dual nationality, American and British, but lives in Lucca, Italy, and Athens, Greece. Read More Read Less