Beauty on Earth

Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) was a French-language Swiss novelist and poet, born in Lausanne, in the canton of Vaud. Writing in a distinctive, incantatory prose rooted in the landscape and peasantry of French-speaking Switzerland, he became the central figure of Suisse romande literature; his portrait later appeared on the Swiss 200-franc banknote, and his Histoire du soldat (1918) was written in collaboration with Igor Stravinsky. Skomlin publishes six of his novels in English translation: Beauty on Earth, The Reign of the Evil One, Riversong of the Rhone, What if the sun..., Derborence, and Farinet's Gold.

Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Born in Japan and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she lives in Switzerland, of which she is now a citizen, and holds an MFA from Emerson College. Her debut novel Fog Island Mountains won the 2013 Christopher Doheny Award from the Center for Fiction; her second, Unfurled, appeared in 2018. She is Translations Editor at Necessary Fiction, and beyond her two Ramuz novels for Skomlin she has translated Claude Cahun and, for Bloomsbury, Corinne Chaponniere's biography of Red Cross founder Henry Dunant.