Elsa Triolet

Elsa Triolet was the name adopted by Ella Yuryevna Kagan, a Russian-French writer and translator born in Moscow in 1896 who died in France in 1970. She was educated in a Jewish family, and through her sister Lilya Brik she met the Russian Futurists, including Roman Jakobson and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose poetry she was the first to translate into French. In 1918 she married the French officer Andre Triolet and emigrated to France. Her first books, In Tahiti (1925), Wild Strawberry (1926) and Camouflage (1928), were written in Russian, and from 1938 she wrote in French. In 1928 she met Louis Aragon, with whom she lived for 42 years and whom she married in 1939; both fought in the French Resistance. In 1944 she became the first woman awarded the Prix Goncourt, for Le premier accroc coute deux cents francs.