Derborence: Where the devils came down

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.

Laura Spinney is a British science journalist and novelist based in Paris. She is the author of the international bestseller Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, translated into more than twenty languages, and of Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (2025), as well as two novels, The Doctor and The Quick. Her writing appears in National Geographic, Nature, The Economist and The Guardian.