Patrick Süskind, born in Ambach on Lake Starnberg in 1949, studied medieval and modern history in Munich and Aix-en-Provence, making a living writing screenplays. His one-man play The Double Bass was published in 1984, his novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer in 1985, the novella The Pigeon in 1987 and The Story of Mr Sommer with illustrations by Jean-Jacques Sempé in 1991.
Jean-Jacques Sempé, born in Bordeaux in 1932, lives in Paris. His caricatures in Paris Match, Punch, Marie-Claire and L’Express were merely the first steps towards his pinnacle at the New Yorker, for which he worked from 1978 on. Sempé’s name is inevitably mentioned in conjunction with writers such as René Goscinny, Patrick Modiano and Patrick Süskind. Without him, characters such as Le Petit Nicolas, Catherine Certitude and Mr Sommer would be unthinkable.
