Category Archives: Albert Camus

Handwritten ‘draft’ of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger sold in Paris for €650,000

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Text appears to have been copied out and backdated by Camus in 1944, possibly as a way to raise funds during Nazi occupation

A handwritten manuscript of the classic French novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus has sold for more than €650,000 (£553,000) at auction, despite bafflement over the reasons for which the Nobel prize-winning author appeared to have faked and backdated it.

The bound, 104-page draft of Camus’s novel about a French settler in Algeria who kills an unnamed Arab man went under the hammer in Paris on Wednesday.

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We need to be physically distant, but we need to share our collective pain | Tim Costello

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The wave of illness and death brought on by coronavirus is only beginning. How do we prepare for the sadness that will be thrust upon us?

• Join Tim Costello as he gives the inaugural Australia at Home lunchtime briefing at 1pm

Like many people, I am re-reading The Plague by Albert Camus. I haven’t picked it up for years.

“The first thing the plague brought to our town was exile ... It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile – that sensation of a void within which never left us ... they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.”

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New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB

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Study expands on archive finds revealed in 2011, and suggests that the French state may have abetted the 1960 car crash that killed him

Sixty years after the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of 46, a new book is arguing that he was assassinated by KGB spies in retaliation for his anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Italian author Giovanni Catelli first aired his theory in 2011, writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had discovered remarks in the diary of the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana that suggested Camus’s death had not been an accident. Now Catelli has expanded on his research in a book titled The Death of Camus.

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