Poet (The Penis and the Hand; The Garden, the Earthquake; Chapel of Nothingness ; Art Poems), novelist (The Man of Marble; The Colors of the Night), and essayist (Nicolas de Staël: Faith and Vertigo), Stéphane Lambert was born in Brussels in 1974. His essay, L’adieu au paysage: Les nymphéas de Claude Monet (Farewell to the Countryside: Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, 2008) was extremely well-reviewed and was read at the Musée de l’Orangerie and at the Grand Palais as part of the Monet retrospective. He also wrote several programs on artists for French public radio and published a book of interviews with the director, Claude Régy (Dans le désordre [In Disarray]), which was awarded the prize for the best book on theater in 2012. In 2011 he published a widely noted essay on the painter, Mark Rothko (Mark Rothko, rêver de ne pas être [Mark Rothko: Dreaming of Not Being]). His autobiographical narrative, Mon corps mis à nu [My Body Laid Bare], was shortlisted for the foremost Belgian literary prize in 2013. A long excerpt of the book was published in English by the online magazine Words without Borders. Desire, the body, the family, death, the chaos of the contemporary world, and the act of creation are the themes that run through his work. During 2014 he directed the Francophone programs at Passa Porta, the international literary center in Brussels. In 2016 critics warmly embraced his book, Before Godot, which examines the link between a painting by Caspar David Friedrich and Beckett’s celebrated play. The book was awarded by the Académie Française (prix Roland de Jouvenel). His short story The Two Writers (excerpt of his novel Paris: City of the Dead) was included in the American anthology Best European Fiction 2017 published by Dalkey Archive Press. In 2018 his book Fraternelle Mélancolie explores the passionate friendship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. His book about Goya received the André Malraux Prize 2019.