France

Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. The recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Prize and the 2016 George Bogin Memorial...

Marissa Davis (she/her) is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Davis is the winner of a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, and in 2023, she received an Emerging Translator ...

Charles Baudelaire is one of the most compelling poets of the 19th century. While Baudelaire’s contemporary Victor Hugo is generally—and sometimes regretfully—acknowledged as the greatest of 19th-century French...

French poet, philosopher, and journalist Charles Péguy grew up poor in Orléans, France. He combined fervent Catholicism with socialist politics to create a body of work unlike any other. As a Twentieth-Century...

Poet Jacques Prevert was born was born on Feburary 4, 1900, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, near Paris. His collections of poetry include Paroles (Words) (1946), Spectacle (1951), La Pluie et le beau temps (...

Richard Wright is recognized as one of the preeminent novelists and essayists of the 20th century. He is most famous for writings depicting the harsh realities of life for Black Americans in the Jim Crow–era...

Philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous is widely considered one of the preeminent French intellectuals writing under the sign of deconstruction. A close friend of Jacques Derrida, Cixous pioneered écriture feminine...

Blaise Cendrars was born Frédéric Louis Sauser in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, to a Swiss father and a Scottish mother. Cendrars was famous for self-mythologizing, and details of his childhood vary: in ...

Poet, actor, and literary translator Hélène Cardona was born in Paris and raised all over Europe before settling in the United States. She earned her MA in American literature from the Sorbonne, where she ...

Gérard de Nerval is the pen name of French Romantic poet and author Gérard Labrunie, who was born in Paris. He was the son of an army doctor and was raised by his great-uncle in the Mortefontaine countryside...

Romanian and French poet, critic, and philosopher Benjamin Fondane was a major figure in Jewish existentialism. Known primarily as a symbolist and surrealist, Fondane began his career in 1914 when he was a...

French poet Raymond Roussel is frequently described as one of 20th-century literature’s most eccentric writers. His work is notable for its inscrutable surfaces and extreme density; its wealth of puns, double...

One of France’s most well-regarded 20th-century poets, Eugène Guillevic was born in Carnac in Brittany. His father was a sailor and later a gendarme in Alsace, where Guillevic attended College d’Altkirch. ...

Born in Boston, poet and novelist Gustaf Sobin earned a BA at Brown University. An admirer of French poet René Char, Sobin arrived in Paris in 1962 to meet the poet who would become his mentor. With Char’s...

French Symbolist poet, novelist, and critic Remy de Gourmont was born into an aristocratic Norman family in the Chateau de la Motte. He was educated at the University of Caen, where he studied law. He worked...

French poet René Char was born in L’Isle-sur-Sorgue in Provence and educated at the University of Aix-en-Provence. He moved to Paris after publishing his first book of poems, Cloches sur le Coeur (1928). In...

Poet Paul Éluard was born Eugène Grindel in 1895 in Saint-Denis, France. He was an only child, and his parents eventually moved to the 10th arrondissement in Paris, where he attended school. Éluard excelled...

A major figure in the avant-garde movements that shaped French literary and visual culture in the 20th century, Louis Marie Alfred Antoine Aragon was born in the Beaux Quartiers arrondissement of Paris in ...

French poet and critic Paul Valéry was born in the small western Mediterranean village of Sète, France in 1871. Critics have called Valéry the last French symbolist, the first post-symbolist, a masterful classical...

Poet Lisa Robertson is known for working in book-length projects. Her subject matter includes political themes, such as gender and nation, as well as the problems of form and genre; she has written works that...