04/21/2026
Andreï Makine is a French novelist who was born September 10th, 1957 (age 68) in Krasnoyarsk, Russian SFSR and grew up in the city of Penza about 700 kilometres (435 mi) south-east of Moscow. As a boy, having acquired familiarity with France and its language from his French-born grandmother, he wrote poems in both French and his native Russian.
In 1987, he went to France as a member of a teacher's exchange program and was granted political asylum. Dreams of My Russian Summers, published in 1995 in France as Le testament français, it became the first in novel in history to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis plus the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens.
In 2001 Makine began secretively publishing as "Gabriel Osmonde", a total of four novels over ten years, the last appearing in 2011. It was considered a mystery among France's literary subculture; many speculated about who Osmonde might be until, in 2011, a scholar noticed Osmonde's book 20,000 femmes dans la vie d'un homme seemed to have been inspired by Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers. Makine confirmed that he was Osmonde. Explaining why he used a pseudonym, he said, "I wanted to create someone who lived far from the hurly-burly of the world". He was elected to seat 5 of the Académie Française on 3 March 2016, succeeding Assia Djebar.
