A franco-American writer and journalist, Jonathan Littell worked for many years for the NGO Action Against Hunger, primarily in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and the DRC.

His novel The Kindly Ones (Prix de l’Académie française and Prix Goncourt 2006) provided an in-depth exploration, through the Nazi experience, of the question of institutional violence and mass murder. He has since extended this questioning through essays such as Le sec et l’humide (2008), as well as numerous feature pieces for Le Monde and the review XXI (often translated into English, in The Guardian and The London Review of Books): first during the 2008 war in Georgia, then in the DRC, in South Sudan and in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico).

A tireless and rigorous investigator, he has published two long features on the LRA, which ran as the cover story for Le Monde Magazine in October 2010 and August 2011. In early 2012, he spent three weeks in the embattled city of Homs in Syria and published a series of five long. articles in Le Monde, before publishing his notes under the title Syrian Notebooks (2012, English translation 2015).

Jonathan Littell has also for many years been fascinated by images, and in 2013 published Triptych: Three Studies after Francis Bacon (2011, English translation 2013), in which he examines the work of the great British painter in light of the great masters who influenced him, of Byzantine art, and of the history of photography.