Pierre Boulle.

Pierre Boulle spent his childhood in a bourgeois environment in the Avignon area. Practicing hunting and fishing from a very young age, he had a strong connection with nature, which may have contributed to his taste for adventure. He once said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a strong exhilaration as the day of my first rabbit!’

In 1936, at the age of twenty-four, after engineering studies, adventure finally came calling when he was bored with dull jobs. A British plantation offered him a position in Malaysia, a paradise for rubber.

There, in this secretive Asia, he forged the free and determined spirit that would lead him to a life of adventure and writing, blending personal memories, as seen in works like ‘Le Sacrilège malais’ or ‘Le Pont de la rivière Kwai,’ and pure fiction as in ‘La Planète des singes’ (‘Planet of the Apes’). Moving between genres, including novels, memoirs, fantasy, and science fiction, Pierre Boulle’s body of work, comprising over twenty novels, shares a common foundation: a critical description of the ways of life in our societies, with a certain humor and a firm humanism.