Georges Perec

Son of Polish Jewish immigrants who perished in the Holocaust (his father killed in action in 1940, his mother murdered in Auschwitz), Perec channeled trauma and absence into extraordinary formal mathematical literary constraints.

In 1969, he published La Disparition, a brilliant 300-page lipogrammatic detective mystery written without the letter 'e' (the most common vowel in French, symbolizing his lost mother). In 1978, he published his magnum opus La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual), moving like a knight across a 10x10 chessboard to describe an entire Paris apartment building at a single frozen moment in time.