After having finished his publishing degree in Amsterdam, Christiaan van Raaijen worked at Arena publishing. He then moved to London where he spent six years at The Marsh Agency as Foreign Rights Agent and Client Account Manager. In 2006, he settled in Paris where he worked for one year at the Agence Michelle Lapautre. Since 2008, he is Foreign Rights Manager at Editions Grasset, an imprint of the Hachette Group.
Grasset was founded in 1907 and has published a number of major twentieth-century novelists, historians and thinkers, including Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, François Mauriac, Paul Morand, and André Malraux, along with Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig. Bernard Grasset’s strong personality and visionary talent helped shape the world of French publishing, and Grasset quickly became one of the country’s most prestigious publishers. Many of its authors are Nobel laureates and Académie Française or other top literary prizewinners.
Today Grasset publishes some of the most celebrated names in French and international fiction Frédéric Beigbeder, Laurent Binet, Virginie Despentes, Dany Laferrière, Amin Maalouf, Pascal Quignard, Isabel Allende, T.C. Boyle, Bukowski, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Umberto Eco, Charles Frazier, Nadine Gordimer, Han Kang, Harper Lee, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arthur Miller, VS Naipaul, Annie Proulx, J.K. Rowling, Sandro Veronesi, A.B. Yehoshua…) and contemporary thought (Anne Applebaum, Pascal Bruckner, Tristan Garcia, René Girard, François Jullien, Emmanuel Levinas, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-Luc Marion, Cédric Villani…). Over 5 300 titles belong to the back list.
With 160 publications every year, Grasset is constantly discovering new talents such as Laurent Binet whose debut novel, HHhH, has been translated into nearly forty languages and was adapted into a movie that came out in June 2017. His second novel, La septième function du langage (The seventh function of language), was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize.
Other two first novels Grasset has published two that turned into best-sellers and international phenomena are Petit Pays (Small country) by Gaël Faye and La Tresse (The braid) by Laetitia Colombani (both also translated into 40 languages).
Virginie Despentes’ trilogy Vernon Subutex, has gathered over one million readers in France, and is adapted into a TV series for Canal+. Vernon Subutex 1 was shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize.
Grasset also has a children’s books department that publishes talented authors and illustrators, such as Raymond Briggs, Peter Sis, Pierre Gripari and Bertrand Santini.
