André Malraux

Malraux's twenties read like adventure fiction: an expedition into French Indochina to remove Khmer temple sculptures ended in his arrest for antiquities theft, and by the early 1930s he was reporting from revolutionary China and colonial Indochina. In the Spanish Civil War he organized and flew with a volunteer air squadron for the Republic, and during the Second World War he fought with the French Resistance, was captured, and escaped before a planned execution.

Man's Fate, set amid Shanghai's failed 1927 Communist uprising, won the Prix Goncourt and made his name as a novelist of revolutionary conviction and philosophical weight. He largely abandoned fiction after the war for art criticism and politics, serving as Charles de Gaulle's Minister of Cultural Affairs from 1959 to 1969, shaping French cultural policy for a decade before his death in 1976.