Jean Gwenaël Dutourd is a French novelist. His mother died when he was seven years old. At the age of twenty, he was taken prisoner fifteen days after Germany's invasion of France in World War II. He escaped six weeks later and returned to Paris where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.
His first work, Le Complexe de César appeared in 1946 and received the prix Stendhal. He was elected to the Académie française November 30, 1978. In 1997 he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.