Alain Defossé

Alain Defossé (11 February 1957 – 14 May 2017) was a French novelist and translator.

Early life
Alain Defossé was born on 11 February 1957 in Nantes. Early on, he was interested in music, jazz in particular, and also cinema, and he studied at the Cours Florent in Paris.

Career
Defossé authored nine novels. His first novel,  Les fourmis d'Anvers, was published in 1991. He also translated several books from English into French. For example, he translated Crazy Cock by Henry Miller in 1990. He also translated American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis in 1993. In 2006, he translated The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. Two years later, in 2008, he translated Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. Other novelists whose work he translated are Irvine Welsh and Joseph Connolly.

In his books L'Homme en habit [The Man in Clothes] and On ne tue pas les gens [We Don't Kill People], Defossé discusses his homosexuality, telling an interviewer in 2015: "my books are, generally speaking, made up of disparate elements that I have kept, consciously or not, in a secret drawer and which, at a certain moment, reappear and aggregate until they form a story and a book ... in my novels, there are also a lot of ghosts, which are certainly my ghosts, but which are also ghosts which belong only to themselves".

Death
Defossé died on 14 May 2017 in Paris.