About Eugène Ionesco
Ionesco wrote mainly in French and helped start a new style of drama with his anti‑play The Bald Soprano, a work that helped launch the Theatre of the Absurd. His other plays often followed Albert Camus’s ideas, exploring absurdism and surrealism. In 1970 he was elected to the Académie française and received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and in 1973 he won the Jerusalem Prize.
