Having failed his baccalauréat exams, he enrolled at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales where he contributed to a dictionary of Amharic.
[2] Eric Ollivier became the secretary of writer François Mauriac from October 1946 to Spring of 1948,[3] when he was called up to carry out his military service.
He became a journalist for the daily newspaper Le Figaro in 1949, and was sent to report from Libya, Tunisia and Morocco.
Author of around thirty books, he was also a television producer and worked for the cinema writing scenarios and dialogue.
Éric Ollivier died on 30 January 2015 at Rueil-Malmaison of intestinal cancer.