Eugène Ionesco

Born Eugen Ionescu in Romania on 26 November 1909, he moved to France and switched languages, writing almost entirely in French. The Bald Soprano arrived as a revolution: techniques and ideas that broke drama open and seeded what became the Theatre of the Absurd. He kept writing plays that leaned into absurdism and surrealism, following the thread Albert Camus had pulled. The Académie française admitted him in 1970; that same year he took the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, then the Jerusalem Prize in 1973. He died 28 March 1994.