Olivier Roussel was born in Nice in 1972. On his father's side, he comes from a family of peasants from central France. On his mother's side, he is a descendant of Jewish artisans from Algiers that were repatriated in 1962, at the end of the Algerian conflict. At the age of six, his parents moved to Paris, where he spent most of his life.In middle school, he became passionate about German and Latin. He discovered the books of Goethe, Brecht, Dürrenmatt and Grass, but also classical Latin authors such as Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius and Ovid. In History, the discovery of the Jewish genocide by Nazi Germany had a profound impact on him. Throughout his life, his relationship with Germany remained extremely complex. In high school, his passion for physics prevailed and he finally decided to pursue a scientific career. After his master's degree in fluid mechanics at Orsay - today Paris-Saclay - Olivier Roussel moved to Karlsruhe, Germany, to do his doctorate. He stayed there for a total of eight years and taught fluid mechanics to German students. At the same time, he became passionate about History through the historical novels of Max Gallo. But the work that influenced him the most was the saga of “The Cursed Kings” (Les rois maudits) by Maurice Druon. He then studied the first university cycle of History as an autodidact, before immersing himself into academic books on the Early Middle Ages and the Long History, in particular those of Pierre Riché and Fernand Braudel.In the second half of his German period, Olivier Roussel settled on the other side of the French-German border, in Northern Alsace. The questions he had to face in this very particular region pushed him to study the national question, in particular the work of Renan, Herder and Fichte. He shared his ideas during discussions with his German friends from Karlsruhe, which allowed him to understand better how History was seen from the "other side".In 2001, he discovered the Russian world thanks to a Ph.D student in Karlsruhe that came from Novosibirsk. It was the beginning of a long friendship. Afterwards, Olivier Roussel visited Siberia, Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, before discovering Ukraine and Belarus. In 2020, he was in Minsk during the riots that followed the contested re-election of Lukashenko.After leaving Karlsruhe in 2008, he led an international academic career, in Brazil, close to Sao Paulo, in northern Sweden and in the United Kingdom, in Cambridge. A polyglot, he was also interested in linguistics, particularly that of Romance languages. However, tired by the emptiness of the academic microcosm, he finally left the academy in 2016, at the age of 44, to turn to industrial research, before founding his own company.In 2011 Olivier Roussel began his first historical novel about the Algerian Jews. “The Three Lives of Georges Serfati” (Les trois vies de Georges Serfati) is partly inspired by the lives of his grandparents and their relatives. In 2012, he visited Algiers for the first time and went to the grave of his great-grandfathers. His novel was published in 2019. In 2024, he wrote his second historical novel on the Early Middle Ages, “Eudes, the man who became king” (Eudes, l'homme qui devint roi). This novel traces the accession to the throne of the first Robertian king and ancestor of the Capetians.Read more about this authorRead less about this author