Raymond Queneau

A master of wordplay, subtle irony, and literary experimentation, he was one of the most prominent French authors of the 20th century. He was a writer, poet, and mathematician, passed through the Surrealist group, and later co-founded OuLiPo. He became famous for his book Exercises in Style, in which he transformed a single banal story into dozens of original forms with inexhaustible imagination.