Collection: Raymond Roussel

Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) was a French writer whose novels, plays and poems — Impressions d’Afrique (1910), Locus Solus (1914), Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (1935) — were constructed through systematic linguistic procedures, improbable associations and deliberately manufactured forms of hallucination. His work was fundamental to the wider Surrealist imagination and later to the Oulipo. Salvador Dalí’s fascination with Roussel endured for decades: Roussel wrote to Dalí in 1932 after receiving the screenplay Babaouo, and Dalí later paid explicit homage in his film Impressions de la Haute Mongolie, Hommage à Raymond Roussel.