Marius Daniel Popescu was born in Craiova, Romania in 1963. In 1990 he moved to Lausanne, Switzerland. Whilst working by day as a bus driver, he had two collections of poems published by the Swiss publishing house Antipodes – one of which won the Prix Rilke in 2006. He continued to edit the literary review, Le Persil, but it wasn’t until the publication of La Symphonie du loup – by Parisian publisher José Corti in 2007 – that his work was discovered, with rapture, in France. The first edition soon sold out and the novel ran into its third French edition, selling over 4,500 copies within a year of publication. Critics are quick to sketch Popescu as an outsider figure, pointing out that despite being a prize-winning author, he continues to work as a bus driver in Lausanne. And yet it is this close-up experience of the everyday that is the source of his literary power and his popularity, which baffles the figures normally associated with Parisian literary life. Training his gaze upon the specific and tangible, his work has an almost English feel, making up an oeuvre little expected from French literature. Popescu was shortlisted for the Prix Wepler-Fondation La Poste 2007 and La Symphonie du loup won him the Prix Robert Walser for the best novel written in French as a foreign language. In 2009 he published a sequel to his debut novel, Les Couleurs de l'hirondelle (The colors of the swallow).