Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s grandnephew and director of the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – d’Agay Estate, Olivier de Giraud d’Agay, filmmaker Mark Osborne, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff will discuss the exceptional life and work of the famous aviation pioneer and internationally-renowned writer.

At the outbreak of WWII, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry joined the French Air Force’s most dangerous unit, the II/33 long-range reconnaissance squadron, until France’s armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilized, he returned to New York on December 31, 1940 not to take refuge, but to use his fame to attempt to persuade the American government of the need to fight fascism and to save the Western democracies.

During his exile in the USA, he wrote in Long Island the tale that would ensure his international fame, The Little Prince, before leaving the country to return to combat in April 1943. A moral allegory with spiritual elements, The Little Prince is the most translated book in the world after the Bible.

In 2015, the first-ever animated feature film adaptation of The Little Prince by American filmmaker Mark Osborne was released. Using both stop-motion and computer-generated animation, movie wraps Saint-Exupéry’s poetic tale of an interstellar traveler who comes to earth in search of companionship inside a modern-day story about a strictly-parented little girl who develops a friendship with a warm and whimsical old neighbor. Co-produced by French company ON Entertainment, the movie was named the “top animated French film export”, which earned Osborne a César (French Oscar) for Best Animated Film.

In English. Free and open to the public. Reservations required. Please RSVP here.

This event is co-organized with the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Foundation and the support of Air France.

This event is co-organized with The Saint-Exupéry Foundation.

Mark Osborne is the two-time Academy Award®-nominated director of the first ever animated feature film adaptation of the classic French novella The Little Prince, featuring the voice talents of Jeff Bridges, Mackenzie Foy, James Franco, Marion Cottillard, Paul Rudd, Ricky Gervais and many others. The film debuted in May of 2015 at the Cannes Film Festival, and moved audiences, performing as both a sincere adaptation, and a loving tribute to the iconic and celebrated work of literature.

Osborne was also a director of 2008’s critically acclaimed animated summer blockbuster Kung Fu Panda, which has netted a worldwide box office of more than $630 million to-date and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature of the year. Featuring the voice talents of Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu and Seth Rogen, the DreamWorks family-friendly action-comedy was Osborne’s first major studio project, which he directed alongside John Stevenson. Currently Osborne is developing several new animated film projects.
Currently Osborne is writing and developing several new animated film projects including an adaptation of Jeff Smith’s BONE.

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, in which she reveals an intrepid and unconventional life that rivals the best adventure stories; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique. All three were New York Times Notable Books; the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. The biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions.
Her fourth book, Cleopatra: A Life, was published to great acclaim in 2010.Cleopatra appeared on most year-end best books lists, including the New York Times‘s Top Ten Books of 2010, and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography. A #1 bestseller, it was translated into 30 languages.
Little, Brown published The Witches: Salem, 1692, in 2015. The New York Times hailed it as “an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative.”
Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Schiff has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She lives in New York City.

Olivier de Giraud d’Agay is the director of the Succession Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – d’Agay Estate, which looks after the author’s intellectual rights, and runs the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Youth Foundation, a youth foundation dedicated to his memory which honors and perpetuates Saint-Exupéry’s legacy by supporting projects for underprivileged children around the world in the field of education and the fight against illiteracy.