[Eric]

As Liam suggests, writing in a foreign language is by no means confined to French-English.

Apart from those mentioned, there was also the Russian-born French author Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999). Whether her Russian would have been strong enough to write in, as she left Russia early in life, is a good question. A similar case is Eugène Ionescu (1909-1994), who even during his childhood was spending a lot of time in France, though he was born in Romania. Paul Celan (1920-1970) wrote a few poems in Romanian, but stuck to German for his most famous poems. Edith Södergran (1892-1923) was a Finland-Swede, with Swedish as her mother tongue. She was educated in Saint Petersburg in German, wrote early poems in that language, and a few in Russian. But she ended up as a great Swedish-language poet. The Fleming Jean Ray (1887-1964; born Raymond de Kremer), wrote fantasy tales and comic strips in both French and Dutch. Some Afrikaans authors like André Brink (born 1935), Breyten Breytenbach (born 1939) and Antjie Krog (born 1952) have written in English as well, especially during apartheid. And as already mentioned Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) wrote in both English and French.

This question fascinates me partly on account of the opposite phenomenon: those who continued to write in their "potty little language" despite the enormous pressure to conform and write in a much larger, more powerful one. I am thinking specifically of the many Baltic writers who did not end up as Russian authors. A few people in Soviet times ended up writing in Russian, their second language, such as Tshingiz Aitmatov (Kyrghyz) and Yuri Rytkheu (Chukchi), but there is no well-respected Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian writer that went over to Russian except for the Lithuanian Jurgis Baltrušaitis.

One Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiongo, despite working as an academic in the USA, decided to start writing novels in his native Gikuyu.

The fact that several key Arabic authors from Lebanon and the French-colonised parts of North Africa wrote in the colonial language is also interesting.

And the fact that India, a country of about one billion population, only has about 200,000 native-speakers of English. Yet authors writing in English are the most visible ones in the English speaking world. I wonder how many of these have English as their first language or mother-tongue.