Edward Brasey is a French novelist , essayist, scriptwriter and storyteller born on March 25, 1954. Author of more than seventy works, many of which have been translated into English, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. He specializes in the themes of the esoteric, fables, legends and fantasy. He won a prize of Imaginal in 2006 for The Little Encyclopedia of the Wonderful , and a prize Merlin in 2009 for his novel The Curse of the Ring . Subsequently, he has become essentially a novelist, notably published by Calmann-Lévy . His historical-esoteric thriller that was published in 2013, The Last Pope , anticipated theabdication of Benedict XVI .