François Charles Mauriac (French: [fʁɑ̃swa ʃaʁl(ə) moʁjak]; Occitan: Francés Carles Mauriac; 11 October 1885 – 1 September 1970) was a French novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, and journalist, a member of the Académie française (from 1933), and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1952). He was awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1958.
The 1952 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French Catholic writer François Mauriac (1885–1970) "for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life." He is the eighth French author to receive the prize after the novelist André Gide in 1947.
The 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the French writer Albert Camus (1913–1960) "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times." He is the ninth French author to become a recipient of the prize after Catholic novelist François Mauriac in 1952, and the fourth philosopher after British analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1950.
Aged 44 when he received the prize, Camus is the second youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after only Rudyard Kipling (41).