Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker. In 1918 her family fled the Russian Revolution for France where she became a bestselling novelist . She was prevented from publishing when the Germans occupied France and moved with her husband and two small daughters from Paris to the safety of the small village of Issy-l'Evêque (in German occupied territory). It was here that Irène began writing Suite Française. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.
Sandra Smith has translated twelve novels by Irène Némirovsky as well as a new translation of Camus' The Outsider. Némirovsky's Suite Française won her the French American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Prize and The PEN Translation Prize. Five of her translations have been adapted as radio plays and broadcast on the BBC. Suite Française is the first to become a film.