Graham Anderson was born in London. After reading French and Italian at Cambridge, he worked on the books pages of City Limits and reviewed fiction for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph. As a translator, he has developed versions of French plays, both classic and contemporary, for the NT and the Gate Theatre, with performances both here and in the USA. Publications include The Figaro Plays (Beaumarchais) and A Flea in Her Ear (Feydeau). For Dedalus he has translated Sappho by Alphonse Daudet, Chasing the Dream and A Woman's Affair by Liane de Pougy. He is based in Oxford.

Born in 1869 near the town of Tours, Liane de Pougy married a naval officer, after becoming pregnant by him while still at her convent school, aged 16. She soon left her violent husband to go to Paris. Their son, Marc Poupre, born 1886 was brought up by his grandmother. She was a dancer at the Folies Bergere in the 1890s and had occasional acting parts but it was in the demi-monde she rose to fame. As a runaway teenage mother, celebrity courtesan, and in later life a princess, a fundraiser for disabled children and, finally, a Dominican lay sister, Liane de Pougy led an extraordinary life.