Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, and in his many wanderings, his love for Scotland never waned. His ancestors were lighthouse builders, and in a poem he celebrates “the towers we founded and the lamps we lit.” He studied engineering and law, but soon discovered that his calling was literature. He was an architect of style. He believed that the practice of prose was more difficult than that of verse, since prose demands continuous, pleasing, and concatenated variations. He was driven south by the respiratory disease from which he suffered; he traveled in Belgium, France, and Switzerland, always painting and writing. He married the American widow Fanny Osbourne in 1880, and in fact, Treasure Island is dedicated to her son Lloyd. His life was largely an exodus in search of good health and in 1890 he settled in Upolu, the main island of Samoa, where he lived until his death in Vailima on December 4, 1894. The natives had nicknamed him Tusitala, the Storyteller. In his vast body of work, his most famous novel was perhaps Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which contains history, drama, the critical or autobiographical essay, the short story, the novel and verse.

Alberto Manguel is an Argentine-Canadian writer, translator, and critic. He has published both fiction and non-fiction, and received numerous international awards, among them the Formentor Prize in 2017 and the Gutenberg Prize in 2018. As an adolescent, in Buenos Aires, from 1965-1969, he read aloud to the blind Jorge Luis Borges. Until August 2018, he was the director of the Argentine National Library. He has lived in Paris, London, Milan, Tahiti, Toronto, New York, and now Lisbon. He occupied the “Europe: Languages and Literatures” chair at the Collège de France from 2021-2022. He is currently the director of Espaço Atlântida: Centro de Estudos da História da Leitura in Lisbon.

Léonard Pouy is Content and Transmission Manager at L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts. Having studied the looters and plunderers of the Thirty Years’ War for his doctoral thesis in art history (at Paris-Sorbonne and the University of Geneva), he then turned his attention to the former “Pirate Coast,” now the western shore of the Arabo-Persian Gulf, as curator of the exhibition Pearl Merchants, a Rediscovered Saga Between the Gulf & France at the Dawn of the 20th century (2019). A specialist in the history of jewelry, his latest book is Paris, City of Pearls (2024). David B. is a comic book artist and writer. After training in applied arts at the Duperré school, he published his first album, Le Timbre maudit (Bayard), in 1986. Along with J.-C. Menu, Stanislas, Mattt Konture, Killoffer, and Lewis Trondheim he is one of the founding members of L’Association, a famous French comic book publisher. It has released a number of his works, including L’Ascension du Haut Mal (Epileptic), his greatest success to date, from 1996 to 2004. Considered one of the masterpieces of modern comics, this album won many international awards, as well as the Scenario Prize at the Angoulême Festival in 2000. Invited by the High Jewelry Maison Van Cleef & Arpels to share his vision of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, David B. has produced a series of colored illustrations.