Biography
Jean Cayrol (1911–2005) was a French poet, novelist and screenwriter. Born in Bordeaux, he joined the French Resistance during the Second World War and was deported to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1943, surviving until liberation in 1945.
He wrote the commentary for Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog (1956), drawing on his poetry collection Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard. Cayrol also wrote the screenplay and dialogue for Resnais’s Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963). He worked as a literary editor at Éditions du Seuil and contributed to the journal Tel Quel.
