14 Facts About Georges Perec

Georges Perec's father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust.

Georges Perec was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.

Georges Perec was taken into the care of his paternal aunt and uncle in 1942, and in 1945, he was formally adopted by them.

Georges Perec started writing reviews and essays for La Nouvelle Revue francaise and Les Lettres nouvelles, prominent literary publications, while studying history and sociology at the Sorbonne.

In 1961 Georges Perec began working at the Neurophysiological Research Laboratory in the unit's research library funded by the CNRS and attached to the Hopital Saint-Antoine in Paris as an archivist, a low-paid position which he retained until 1978.

Georges Perec dedicated his masterpiece, to Queneau, who died before it was published.

Georges Perec began working on a series of radio plays with his translator Eugen Helmle and the musician Philippe Drogoz in the late 60s; less than a decade later, he was making films.

Georges Perec was a writer-in-residence at the University of Queensland in Australia in 1981, during which time he worked on 53 Jours, which remained unfinished.

Georges Perec died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at age 45, four days shy of his 46th birthday; his ashes are held at the columbarium of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Georges Perec's 300-page novel La disparition is a lipogram, written with natural sentence structure and correct grammar, but using only words that do not contain the letter "e".

Georges Perec's novella Les revenentes is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used.

The Association Georges Perec has extensive archives on the author in Paris.

In 1992 Georges Perec's initially rejected novel Gaspard pas mort, believed to be lost, was found by David Bellos amongst papers in the house of Georges Perec's friend Alain Guerin.

Georges Perec was featured as a Google Doodle on his 80th birthday.