Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles (April 1, 1697 – December 23, 1763), usually known simply as the Abbé Prévost, was a French author and novelist.
He was born at Hesdin, Artois, and first appears with the full name of Prévost d'Exiles, in a letter to the booksellers of Amsterdam in 1731. His father, Lievin Prévost, was a lawyer, and several members of the family had embraced the ecclesiastical estate. Prévost was educated at the Jesuit school of Hesdin, and in 1713 became a novice of the order in Paris, pursuing his studies at the same time at the college in La Flèche.
At the end of 1716 he left the Jesuits to join the army, but soon tired of military life, and returned to Paris in 1719, apparently with the idea of resuming his novitiate. He
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Madame de La Fayette
Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de la Fayette
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Christened Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, she was born in Paris to a family of minor but wealthy nobility. At 16, de la Vergne became the maid of honor to Queen Anne of Austria and began also to acquire a literary education from Gilles Ménage, who gave her lessons in Italian and Latin. Ménage would lead her to join the fashionable salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, had died a year before, and the same year her mother married Renaud de Sévigné, uncle of Madame de Sévigné, who would remain her lifelong intimate friend.
In 1655, de la Vergne married François Motier, comte de La Fayette, a widowed nobleman some eighteen y -
Alexandre Shirvanzade
Alexandre Shirvanzade (born Alexander Movsisyan) was an Armenian playwright and novelist. Alexander Movsisyan was born on April 18, 1858, into a tailor's family in the province of Shirvan, in what is now Azerbaijan (then Shemakha Governorate, Russian Empire), and later adopted the pen-name Shirvanzade (son of Shirvan). He brought to fruition the social realist school of Armenian drama promoted by Gabriel Sundukian a generation earlier. At the age of 17, Shirvanzade went to work in the Caspian city of Baku whose fortunes were beginning to rise with the boom in oil production.
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He immersed himself in Armenian and Russian literature as well as reading Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Shakespeare, his greatest love. Working first as a clerk a -
Vardges Petrosyan
Vardges Petrosyan, a prominent novelist, playwright and essayist was born in 1932 in the village of Ashtarak in the Ararat Valley, where he spent his childhood years, finished school and began writing his first verses.
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In 1954 he graduated from the Yerevan University and started writing for several youth newpapers. As a newspaper correspondent he travelled all over his native Armenia and throughout the entire Soviet Union—from 'Yakutia in Eastern Siberia to Karelia in the northwest of the country.
His first collection of poems, "The Ballad of Man", came out in 1958, to be followed by collections of essays, feature stories and tales.
Vardges Petrosyan is best known for his novels "The Last Teacher", "Letters from the Small Stations of Childhood -
Eiji Yoshikawa
Pen-name of Yoshikawa Hidetsugu. Yoshikawa is well-known for his work as a Japanese historical fiction novelist, and a number of re-makes have been spawned off his work.
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In 1960, he received the Order of Cultural Merit.
Eiji Yoshikawa (吉川 英治, August 11, 1892 – September 7, 1962) was a Japanese historical novelist. Among his best-known novels, most are revisions of older classics. He was mainly influenced by classics such as The Tale of the Heike, Tale of Genji, Outlaws of the Marsh, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, many of which he retold in his own style. As an example, the original manuscript of Taiko is 15 volumes; Yoshikawa took up to retell it in a more accessible tone, and reduced it to only two volumes. His other books also serve sim -
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (June 20, 1786 – July 23, 1859) was a French poet.
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She was born in Douai. Following the French Revolution, her family emigrated to Guadeloupe. In 1817 she married her second husband, the actor Prosper Lanchantin-Valmore.
She published Élégies et Romances, her first poetic work, in 1819. Her melancholy, elegiacal poems are admired for their grace and profound emotion.
Marceline appeared as an actress and singer in Douai, Rouen, the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, where she notably played Rosine in Beaumarchais's Le Barbier de Séville. She retired from the stage in 1823. She later became friends with the novelist Honoré de Balzac, and he once wrote that she was an inspiration for the -
Alain-Fournier
Alain-Fournier was the pseudonym of Henri-Alban Fournier (1886 – 1914), a French author and soldier. He wrote a single novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), which was adapted into two feature films and is considered a classic of French literature.
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Alain-Fournier was born in La Chapelle-d'Angillon, in the Cher département, in central France, the son of a school teacher. He studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris, where he prepared for the entrance examination to the École Normale Supérieure, but without success. He then studied at the merchant marine school in Brest. At the Lycée Lakanal he met Jacques Rivière, and the two became close friends. In 1909, Rivière married Alain-Fournier's younger sister Isabelle.
Alain-Four -
Molière
Sophisticated comedies of French playwright Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, include Tartuffe (1664), The Misanthrope (1666), and The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670).
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French literary figures, including Molière and Jean de la Fontaine, gathered at Auteuil, a favorite place.
People know and consider Molière, stage of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, also an actor of the greatest masters in western literature. People best know l'Ecole des femmes (The School for Wives), l'Avare ou l'École du mensonge (The Miser), and le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) among dramas of Molière.
From a prosperous family, Molière studied at the Jesuit Clermont college (now lycée Louis-le-Grand) and well suited to begin a life in the -
Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille était l'un des trois grands dramaturges français du XVIIe siècle , avec Molière et Racine. Il a été appelé «le fondateur de la tragédie française» et était productive pendant près de quarante ans.
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Vous pouvez lire son oeuvre sur:
- http://www.poesies.net/corneille.html
- http://gallica.bnf.fr/Search?ArianeWi...
Pierre Corneille was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine. He has been called "the founder of French tragedy" and produced plays for nearly forty years.
You can read his works (in French) on:
- http://www.poesies.net/corneille.html
- http://gallica.bnf.fr/Search?ArianeWi... -
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Émile Zola
Émile Zola was a prominent French novelist, journalist, and playwright widely regarded as a key figure in the development of literary naturalism. His work profoundly influenced both literature and society through its commitment to depicting reality with scientific objectivity and exploring the impact of environment and heredity on human behavior. Born and raised in France, Zola experienced early personal hardship following the death of his father, which deeply affected his understanding of social and economic struggles—a theme that would later permeate his writings.
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Zola began his literary career working as a clerk for a publishing house, where he developed his skills and cultivated a passion for literature. His early novels, such as Thérèse -
Denis Diderot
Work on the Encyclopédie (1751-1772), supreme accomplishment of French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot, epitomized the spirit of thought of Enlightenment; he also wrote novels, plays, critical essays, and brilliant letters to a wide circle of friends and colleagues.
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Jean le Rond d'Alembert contributed.
This artistic prominent persona served as best known co-founder, chief editor, and contributor.
He also contributed notably to literature with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding structure and content, while also examining ideas about free will. Diderot also authored of the known dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nep -
François Rabelais
French humanist François Rabelais wrote satirical attacks, most notably Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), on medieval scholasticism and superstition.
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People historically regarded this major Renaissance doctor of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes, and songs. Considered of the great of world literature, he created modern Europe. He also published under the names Alcofribas Nasier and Séraphin Calobarsy.
François Rabelais était un des grand écrivains de la Renaissance française, médecin et humaniste. Il a toujours été considéré comme un écrivain de fantaisie, de satire, de grotesque et à la fois de blagues et de chansons de débauche. Rabelais est considéré comme l'un des grands écrivains de la littérature mondiale et par -
Victor Hugo
After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862).
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This poet, playwright, novelist, dramatist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, and perhaps the most influential, important exponent of the Romantic movement in France, campaigned for human rights. People in France regard him as one of greatest poets of that country and know him better abroad. -
Jean Racine
Classical Greek and Roman themes base noted tragedies, such as Britannicus (1669) and Phèdre (1677), of French playwright Jean Baptiste Racine.
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Adherents of movement of Cornelis Jansen included Jean Baptiste Racine.
This dramatist ranks alongside Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin) and Pierre Corneille of the "big three" of 17th century and of the most important literary figures in the western tradition. Psychological insight, the prevailing passion of characters, and the nakedness of both plot and stage mark dramaturgy of Racine. Although primarily a tragedian, Racine wrote one comedy.
Orphaned by the age of four years when his mother died in 1641 and his father died in 1643, he came into the care of his grandparents. At the death of -
Molière
Sophisticated comedies of French playwright Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, include Tartuffe (1664), The Misanthrope (1666), and The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670).
Buy books on Amazon
French literary figures, including Molière and Jean de la Fontaine, gathered at Auteuil, a favorite place.
People know and consider Molière, stage of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, also an actor of the greatest masters in western literature. People best know l'Ecole des femmes (The School for Wives), l'Avare ou l'École du mensonge (The Miser), and le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) among dramas of Molière.
From a prosperous family, Molière studied at the Jesuit Clermont college (now lycée Louis-le-Grand) and well suited to begin a life in the -
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was a French writer and botanist. He is best known for his 1788 novel Paul et Virginie, now largely forgotten, but in the 19th century a very popular children's book.
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Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute (July 18, 1900 in Ivanovo, Russia – October 19, 1999 in Paris, France) was a lawyer and a French writer of Russian-Jewish origin.
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Sarraute was born Natalia/Natacha Tcherniak in Ivanovo (then known as Ivanovo-Voznesensk), 300 km north-east of Moscow in 1900 (although she frequently referred to the year of her birth as 1902, a date still cited in select reference works), and, following the divorce of her parents, spent her childhood shuttled between France and Russia. In 1909 she moved to Paris with her father. Sarraute studied law and literature at the prestigious Sorbonne, having a particular fondness for 20th century literature and the works of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, who greatly affected her conception of the no -
Arthur Rimbaud
Hallucinatory work of French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud strongly influenced the surrealists.
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With known transgressive themes, he influenced modern literature and arts, prefiguring. He started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian war. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. After assembling his last major work, Illuminations , Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 years in 1874.
A hectic, violent romantic relationship, which lasted nearly two years at times, with fellow poet Paul Verlaine engaged Rimbaud, a libertine, restless soul. Aft -
Louise Labé
The precise date of Louise Labé's birth is unknown. She is born somewhere between 1516 (her parents marriage) and 1523 (her mother's death).
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Both her father and her stepmother Antoinette Taillard (whom Pierre Charly married following Etiennette Roybet's death in 1523) were illiterate, but Labé received an education in Latin, Italian and music, perhaps in a convent school.
At the siege of Perpignan, or in a tournament there, she is said to have dressed in male clothing and fought on horseback in the ranks of the Dauphin, afterwards Henry II.
Between 1543 and 1545 she married Ennemond Perrin, a ropemaker.
She became active in a circle of Lyonnais poets and humanists grouped around the figure of Maurice Scève. Her Œuvres were printed in 1555, by t -
Alfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist. Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, autobiographical) from 1836.
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Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris. His family was upper-class but poor and his father worked in various key government positions, but never gave his son any money. His mother was similarly accomplished, and her role as a society hostess, - for example her drawing-room parties, luncheons, and dinners, held in the Musset residence - left a lasting impression on young Alfred.
Early indications of Musset's boyhood talents were seen by his fondness for acting impromptu min -
Olympe de Gouges
Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience. She became an outspoken advocate for ameliorating the condition of slaves in the colonies and she began writing political pamphlets. Today she is perhaps best known as an early feminist who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men.
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In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of Maximilien Robespierre and for her close relation with the Girondists. -
Jean-Luc Lagarce
Dramaturge français du XXe siècle, Jean-Luc Lagarce réalise d'abord des pièces proches du théâtre de l'absurde de Samuel Beckett et Eugène Ionesco, puis évolue vers un théâtre autofictionnel largement influencé par sa contraction du sida, maladie de laquelle il meurt à 38 ans. En 1992, il fonde la maison d'édition Les Solitaires intempestifs avec François Berreur.
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Wajdi Mouawad
Né au Liban le 16 octobre 1968, Wajdi Mouawad est contraint d’abandonner sa terre natale à l’âge de huit ans, pour cause de guerre civile. Débute une période d’exil qui le conduit d’abord avec sa famille à Paris. Une patrie d’adoption qu’il doit à son tour quitter en 1983, l’État lui refusant les papiers nécessaires à son maintien sur le territoire. De l’Hexagone, il rejoint alors le Québec.
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C’est là qu’il fait ses études et obtient en 1991 le diplôme en interprétation de l’École nationale de théâtre du Canada à Montréal. Il codirige aussitôt avec la comédienne Isabelle Leblanc sa première compagnie, Théâtre Ô Parleur.
En 2000, il est sollicité pour prendre la direction artistique du Théâtre de Quat’Sous à Montréal pendant quatre saisons.
Il -
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Adam de la Halle
13th century French poet.
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Adam de la Halle is also known under the name Adam le Bossu (Adam the Hunchback) or Adam d'Arras. -
Pierre Corneille
Pierre Corneille était l'un des trois grands dramaturges français du XVIIe siècle , avec Molière et Racine. Il a été appelé «le fondateur de la tragédie française» et était productive pendant près de quarante ans.
Buy books on Amazon
Vous pouvez lire son oeuvre sur:
- http://www.poesies.net/corneille.html
- http://gallica.bnf.fr/Search?ArianeWi...
Pierre Corneille was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine. He has been called "the founder of French tragedy" and produced plays for nearly forty years.
You can read his works (in French) on:
- http://www.poesies.net/corneille.html
- http://gallica.bnf.fr/Search?ArianeWi... -
Madame de La Fayette
Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de la Fayette
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Christened Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, she was born in Paris to a family of minor but wealthy nobility. At 16, de la Vergne became the maid of honor to Queen Anne of Austria and began also to acquire a literary education from Gilles Ménage, who gave her lessons in Italian and Latin. Ménage would lead her to join the fashionable salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, had died a year before, and the same year her mother married Renaud de Sévigné, uncle of Madame de Sévigné, who would remain her lifelong intimate friend.
In 1655, de la Vergne married François Motier, comte de La Fayette, a widowed nobleman some eighteen y -
Pierre de Beaumarchais
Le Barbier de Séville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the comic plays, best-known works of French writer Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, inspired Gioacchino Antonio Rossini and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to operas.
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Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a musician, diplomat, horticulturalist, satirist, and American revolutionary, made watches, invented, inventor, fled, spied, published, dealt arms, and financed.
Born a son to a provincial watchmaker , Beaumarchais rose in society as an influential inventor and music teacher in the court of Louis XV. He made a number of important business and social contacts in various roles as a diplomat and spy,and earned a considerable fortune before a series of costly court battles jeo -
Jean-Luc Lagarce
Dramaturge français du XXe siècle, Jean-Luc Lagarce réalise d'abord des pièces proches du théâtre de l'absurde de Samuel Beckett et Eugène Ionesco, puis évolue vers un théâtre autofictionnel largement influencé par sa contraction du sida, maladie de laquelle il meurt à 38 ans. En 1992, il fonde la maison d'édition Les Solitaires intempestifs avec François Berreur.
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François Rabelais
French humanist François Rabelais wrote satirical attacks, most notably Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), on medieval scholasticism and superstition.
Buy books on Amazon
People historically regarded this major Renaissance doctor of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes, and songs. Considered of the great of world literature, he created modern Europe. He also published under the names Alcofribas Nasier and Séraphin Calobarsy.
François Rabelais était un des grand écrivains de la Renaissance française, médecin et humaniste. Il a toujours été considéré comme un écrivain de fantaisie, de satire, de grotesque et à la fois de blagues et de chansons de débauche. Rabelais est considéré comme l'un des grands écrivains de la littérature mondiale et par -
Stendhal
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).
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Florian Zeller
Florian Zeller is a French novelist and playwright. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, including English. He won the Prix Interallié in 2004 for his novel "Fascination of Evil" ("La Fascination du Pire").
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Edmond Rostand
People know light, entertaining works, particularly Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), of French playwright Edmond Rostand.
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Neo-romanticism associates poet and dramatist Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand. His romantic plays provided an alternative to the popular naturalistic theatre during the late 19th century. People adapted "Les Romanesques" as the highly successful musical comedy "The Fantasticks."
The Académie Française elected this youngest writer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_... -
Prosper Mérimée
Prosper Mérimée was a French dramatist, historian, archaeologist, and short story writer. He is perhaps best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen.
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Mérimée loved mysticism, history, and the unusual, and may have been influenced by Charles Nodier (though he did not appreciate his works), the historical fiction popularised by Sir Walter Scott and the cruelty and psychological drama of Aleksandr Pushkin. Many of his stories are mysteries set in foreign places, Spain and Russia being popular sources of inspiration.
In 1834, Mérimée was appointed to the post of inspector-general of historical monuments. He was a born archaeologist, combining linguistic faculty of a very unusual kind with accurate scholarship, -
Jean Anouilh
Works, such as Antigone (1944), of French playwright Jean Anouilh juxtapose harsh reality and fantasy.
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A Basque family bore Anouilh in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux. From his father, a tailor, Anouilh maintained that he inherited a dignity in conscientious craftsmanship. He may owe his artistic bent to his mother, a violinist, whose summer seasons in the casino orchestra in the nearby seaside resort of Arcachon supplemented the meager income of the family.
He attended école primaire supérieure and received his secondary education at the Collège Chaptal. Jean-Louis Barrault, a pupil at the same time and later a major director, recalls Anouilh as an intense, rather dandified figure, who hardly noticed a boy some t -
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer d'Argens
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens (June 24, 1704 - January 11, 1771) was a French philosopher and writer.
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Boyer was born in Aix-en-Provence. An arch-opponent of the Catholic Church, intolerance and religious oppression, he had to flee his native France and his books were frequently denounced by the Inquisition. In 1724 he accompanied the French ambassador on a journey to Constantinople, where he lived for a year. After an adventurous youth, he was disinherited by his father. He then settled for a time in Amsterdam, where he wrote his famous Lettres juives (The Hague, 6 vols, 1738-1742), Lettres chinoises (The Hague, 6 vols, 1739-1742), and Lettres cabalistiques (2nd ed., 7 vols, 1769); also the Mémoires secrets de la république des le -
Joachim du Bellay
born perhaps 1522
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Joachim du Bellay, French poet, founded a group, known as the Pléiade, and wrote sonnets, satires on literary conventions, and a manifesto of the principles.
Joachim du Bellay or Du Bellay, a critic and member, authored Defense and Illustration of the French Language . From 1553, Les Regrets , his most famous work, collects elegy and then finally encomia on the occasion of his stay in Rome to 1557.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim... -
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist, well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born in Belgium to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, but he grew up in Paris. His father was an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Lévi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Lévi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind,
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Guillaume Apollinaire
Italian-French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, originally Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, led figures in avant-garde literary and artistic circles.
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A Polish mother bore Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, this known writer and critic.
People credit him among the foremost of the early 20th century with coining the word surrealism and with writing Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917), the play of the earliest works, so described and later used as the basis for an opera in 1947.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillau... -
Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes, commonly regarded as the father of Arthurian romance and a key figure in Western literature, composed in French in the latter part of the twelfth century. Virtually nothing is known of his life. Possibly a native of Troyes, he enjoyed patronage there from the Countess Marie of Champagne before dedicating his last romance to Count Philip of Flanders, perhaps about 1182. His poetry is marked by a learning and a taste for dialectic acquired in Latin schools; but at the same time it reveals a warm human sympathy which breathes life into characters and situations. Whilst much of his matter is inherited from the world of Celtic myth and the events notionally unfold in the timeless reign of King Arthur, the society and customs
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Denis Diderot
Work on the Encyclopédie (1751-1772), supreme accomplishment of French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot, epitomized the spirit of thought of Enlightenment; he also wrote novels, plays, critical essays, and brilliant letters to a wide circle of friends and colleagues.
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Jean le Rond d'Alembert contributed.
This artistic prominent persona served as best known co-founder, chief editor, and contributor.
He also contributed notably to literature with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding structure and content, while also examining ideas about free will. Diderot also authored of the known dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nep -
Marina Tsvetaeva
Марина Цветаева
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Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. Her father, Ivan Tsvetaev, was a professor of art history and the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother Mariya, née Meyn, was a talented concert pianist. The family travelled a great deal and Tsvetaeva attended schools in Switzerland, Germany, and at the Sorbonne, Paris. Tsvetaeva started to write verse in her early childhood. She made her debut as a poet at the age of 18 with the collection Evening Album, a tribute to her childhood.
In 1912 Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron, they had two daughters and one son. Magic Lantern showed her technical mastery and was followed in 1913 by a selection of poems from her first collections. Tsvetaeva's affair with the poet and opera li -
Louise Labé
The precise date of Louise Labé's birth is unknown. She is born somewhere between 1516 (her parents marriage) and 1523 (her mother's death).
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Both her father and her stepmother Antoinette Taillard (whom Pierre Charly married following Etiennette Roybet's death in 1523) were illiterate, but Labé received an education in Latin, Italian and music, perhaps in a convent school.
At the siege of Perpignan, or in a tournament there, she is said to have dressed in male clothing and fought on horseback in the ranks of the Dauphin, afterwards Henry II.
Between 1543 and 1545 she married Ennemond Perrin, a ropemaker.
She became active in a circle of Lyonnais poets and humanists grouped around the figure of Maurice Scève. Her Œuvres were printed in 1555, by t -
Olympe de Gouges
Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience. She became an outspoken advocate for ameliorating the condition of slaves in the colonies and she began writing political pamphlets. Today she is perhaps best known as an early feminist who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men.
Buy books on Amazon
In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of Maximilien Robespierre and for her close relation with the Girondists. -
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Adam de la Halle
13th century French poet.
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Adam de la Halle is also known under the name Adam le Bossu (Adam the Hunchback) or Adam d'Arras. -
Richard Curtis
Richard Whalley Anthony Curtis, CBE
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Graduate of Harrow School and subsequently Christ Church, University of Oxford. Academy Award nominee and recipient of Emmy and BAFTA awards for screenwriting. He is also a director and producer. In 2007, he became a Fellow of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). -
Francis Ponge
Francis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. Influenced by surrealism, he developed a form of prose poem, minutely examining everyday objects.
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Hélène Dorion
Hélène Dorion est née à Québec le 21 avril 1958. Elle y a fait ses études primaires et secondaires, au Collège Notre-Dame-de-Bellevue, puis ses études collégiales au cégep de Sainte-Foy, avant d’entrer à l’Université Laval où elle obtient, en 1980, un baccalauréat en philosophie, et en 1982 une maîtrise en lettres. Membre de la rédaction de la revue philosophique de la faculté, Considérations, elle y publie des textes de réflexion portant entre autres sur les présocratiques, Nietzsche et Camus. Un passage s’opère alors de la philosophie à la littérature, et en même temps qu’elle entreprend des études en lettres qui mèneront, en 1985, à l’obtention d’une maîtrise. Elle publie ses premiers poèmes en 1981 dans la revue Estuaire. L’année suivan
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Joël Pommerat
Joël Pommerat was born in 1963. As a Playwright-director, he has devoted himself exclusively to writing for the theatre since 1986, after acting for several years. Seeking to bring his writing to the stage, he founded the Compagnie Louis Brouillard in 1990 and created his first shows at Théâtre de la Main d’Or in Paris (Le Chemin de Dakar, Le Théâtre, Vingt cinq années, Des suées, Les Evénements). In 1995, he wrote Pôles which was originally produced at the Théâtre des Fédérés in Montluçon and then reprised at Théâtre de la Main d’Or. In 1996, a workshop with about 30 actors resulted in the creation of Présences which was performed in Hublot. The next year, after a residency at Montluçon, he went back to work on the same play which became T
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George Sand
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, best known by her pen name George Sand, was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. One of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era. She wrote more than 50 volumes of various works to her credit, including tales, plays and political texts, alongside her 70 novels.
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Like her great-grandmother, Louise Dupin, whom she admired, George Sand advocated for women's rights and passion, criticized the institution of marriage, and fought against the prejudices of a conservative society. She was considered scandalo -
Hervé Bazin
Hervé Bazin (Jean-Pierre Hervé-Bazin) (April 7, 1911, Angers - February 17, 1996, Angers) was a French writer, whose best-known novels covered semi-autobiographical topics of teenage rebellion and dysfunctional families
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Victor Hugo
After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862).
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This poet, playwright, novelist, dramatist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, and perhaps the most influential, important exponent of the Romantic movement in France, campaigned for human rights. People in France regard him as one of greatest poets of that country and know him better abroad. -
Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (7 November 1838 – 19 August 1889) was a French symbolist writer.
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Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute (July 18, 1900 in Ivanovo, Russia – October 19, 1999 in Paris, France) was a lawyer and a French writer of Russian-Jewish origin.
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Sarraute was born Natalia/Natacha Tcherniak in Ivanovo (then known as Ivanovo-Voznesensk), 300 km north-east of Moscow in 1900 (although she frequently referred to the year of her birth as 1902, a date still cited in select reference works), and, following the divorce of her parents, spent her childhood shuttled between France and Russia. In 1909 she moved to Paris with her father. Sarraute studied law and literature at the prestigious Sorbonne, having a particular fondness for 20th century literature and the works of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, who greatly affected her conception of the no -
Antoine Compagnon
Professeur de littérature française à la Sorbonne, à l'université Columbia de New York et au Collège de France
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Né le 20 juillet 1950 à Bruxelles, dans une famille de six enfants. Son père, le général Jean Compagnon fait la guerre de 1940 puis les guerres d’Indochine et d’Algérie. Orphelin de mère à quatorze ans, il passe son enfance à Londres, Tunis, Washington et fait sa classe de rhétorique dans un lycée militaire de la Sarthe.
Ancien élève de l'Ecole polytechnique, ingénieur des ponts et chaussées et docteur ès lettres, Antoine Compagnon est maître de conférences à l'Ecole polytechnique (1978-1985), professeur à l'Institut français du Royaume-Uni à Londres (1980-1981), à l'université Columbia à New York depuis 1985, à l'université du Mans -
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Pierre de Beaumarchais
Le Barbier de Séville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the comic plays, best-known works of French writer Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, inspired Gioacchino Antonio Rossini and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to operas.
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Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a musician, diplomat, horticulturalist, satirist, and American revolutionary, made watches, invented, inventor, fled, spied, published, dealt arms, and financed.
Born a son to a provincial watchmaker , Beaumarchais rose in society as an influential inventor and music teacher in the court of Louis XV. He made a number of important business and social contacts in various roles as a diplomat and spy,and earned a considerable fortune before a series of costly court battles jeo -
René Barjavel
René Barjavel, né le 24 janvier 1911 à Nyons (Drôme) et décédé le 24 novembre 1985 à Paris, est un écrivain et journaliste français principalement connu pour ses romans d'anticipation.
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Certains thèmes y reviennent fréquemment : chute de la civilisation causée par les excès de la science et la folie de la guerre, caractère éternel et indestructible de l'amour (Ravage, Le Grand Secret, La Nuit des temps, Une rose au paradis). Son écriture se veut poétique, onirique et, parfois, philosophique. Il a aussi abordé dans de remarquables essais l'interrogation empirique et poétique sur l'existence de Dieu (notamment, La Faim du tigre), et le sens de l'action de l'homme sur la Nature. Il fut aussi scénariste/dialoguiste de films. On lui doit en partic -
Alfred de Musset
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist. Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century, autobiographical) from 1836.
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Musset was born on 11 December 1810 in Paris. His family was upper-class but poor and his father worked in various key government positions, but never gave his son any money. His mother was similarly accomplished, and her role as a society hostess, - for example her drawing-room parties, luncheons, and dinners, held in the Musset residence - left a lasting impression on young Alfred.
Early indications of Musset's boyhood talents were seen by his fondness for acting impromptu min -
Jean-Claude Carrière
Jean-Claude Carrière is a writer, playwright and screenwriter, who has also written under the pseudonym Benoît Becker.
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Andrée Chedid
Andrée Chedid was a French poet and novelist of Christian Lebanese descent.
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When she was ten, she was sent to a boarding school, where she learned English and French. At fourteen, she left for Europe. She then returned to Cairo to go to an American university. Her dream was to become a dancer. She got married to a physician when she was twenty-two, with whom she has two children: Louis Chedid, now a famous French singer, and Michèle. Her work questions human condition and what links the individual to the world. Her writing seeks to evoke the Orient, but she focuses more in denouncing the civil war that destroys Lebanon. She has lived in France since 1946. Because of this diverse background, her work is truly multicultural. Her first book was -
Pétrus Borel
Pétrus Borel was a French poet and writer of the Romantic movement and a translator.
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Born Joseph-Pierre Borel dHauterive at Lyon, the 12 of 14 children of an ironmonger, including his brother André Borel d'Hauterive. He studied architecture in Paris but abandoned it for literature. Nicknamed le Lycanthrope ("wolfman"), and the center of the circle of Bohemians in Paris, he was noted for extravagant and eccentric writing, foreshadowing Surrealism. He was not commercially successful though, and eventually was found a minor civil service post by his friends, including Theophile Gautier.
He died at Mostaganem in Algeria.
He was the subject of a biography by Enid Starkie, Petrus Borel: The Lycanthrope (1954).
Pétrus Borel dit « le lycanthrope » est -
Anna de Noailles
Born Princess Anna Elisabeth Bibesco-Bassaraba de Brancovan in Paris, she was a descendant of the Bibescu and Craioveşti families of Romanian boyars. Her father was Prince Grégoire Bibesco-Bassaraba, a son of Wallachian Prince Gheorghe Bibesco and Zoe Mavrocordato-Bassaraba de Brancovan. Her Greek mother was the former Ralouka (Rachel) Mussurus, a musician, to whom the Polish composer Ignacy Paderewski dedicated several of his compositions. Via her mother, Anna de Noailles is a great-great-granddaughter of Sophronius of Vratsa, one of the leading figures of the Bulgarian National Revival, through his grandson Stefan Bogoridi, caimacam of Moldavia.
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In 1897 she married Mathieu Fernand Frédéric Pascal de Noailles (1873–1942), the fourth son of -
Jean de la Fontaine
French writer Jean de la Fontaine collected the stories of Aesop and other persons in his Fables (1668-1694).
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French literary figures, including Molière and Jean de la Fontaine, gathered at Auteuil, a favorite place.
People most widely read the famous poet Jean de la Fontaine of the 17th century.
According to Gustave Flaubert, only this poet understood and mastered the texture of the language before Victor Marie Hugo. A set of postage stamps, issued in 1995, celebrates la Fontaine. Jean de La Fontaine, le défi , a film, released in April 2007, starred Lorànt Deutsch of his life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_de... -
Gabriel de Guilleragues
Gabriel-Joseph de Lavergne, comte de Guilleragues (1628-1684), was a French politician of the 17th century.
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For a time, he was secretary of the King's Chamber, and he also director of the Gazette de France.
In 1677, he was named ambassador at the Ottoman Court. In 1679 and 1680, Louis XIV through Guilleragues encouraged the Ottoman Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa to intervene in the Magyar Rebellion against the Habsburg, but without success. Louis XIV communicated to the Turks that he would never fight on the side of the Austrian Emperor Leopold I, and he instead massed troops at the eastern frontier of France. These reassurances encouraged the Turks not to renew the 20-year 1664 Vasvar truce with Austria and to move to the offensive.
Guilleragues d -
Vercors
Vercors was the pen name of Jean Marcel Bruller, taken from a French province where Bruller fought during the early stages of the Second World War. During the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s, Vercors/Bruller co-founded the clandestine publishing operation Les Éditions de Minuit (The Midnight Press) and was a key literary figure in the Resistance.
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Claire de Duras
Claire de Duras left her native France for London during the French Revolution in 1789, and returned to France in 1808 as the Duchess of Duras. She maintained a famous literary salon in post-Revolutionary Paris and was the close friend of Chateaubriand, who she had met while in exile in London, and who helped her to publish her books.
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Ourika was published anonymously in 1823, one of five novels Claire de Duras had written during the previous year; only two of them were published during her lifetime. The three novellas that she did publish were only done so in order to prevent any possible plagiarism.
Claire de Duras treated complex and controversial subjects, primarily dealing with oppressed/marginalized characters. She explored many fundamen -
Moka
Née le 7 juin 1958 au Havre.
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Diplômée de l’Université de Cambridge.
Trésorière de La Charte des Auteurs et Illustrateurs pour la Jeunesse (de 1999 à 2007).
Commissaire permanent chargée des affaires générales de la Sofia (Société Française des Intérêts des Auteurs de l’Ecrit) jusqu’en 2007.
Sociétaire de la SGDL et de la SACD.
Publie son premier roman, Escalier C, en 1983. Après quatre romans pour adultes, se consacre à la littérature pour la jeunesse. Scénariste-dialoguiste et consultante pour le cinéma et la télévision.
Auteur de plus de cent livres.
Récompensée par une cinquantaine de prix dont le Prix du Premier Roman, le Prix des Incorruptibles, le Tam-tam Je Bouquine, le Prix du Polar, le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, le Prix des Embouquineurs -
Jean Giraudoux
Greek mythology or Biblical stories base dramas, such as Electra (1937), of French writer Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux, who also wrote several novels. He fathered Jean-Pierre Giraudoux.
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People consider this French novelist, essayist, diplomat. and playwright among the most important French dramatists of the period between World War I and World War II. They note his work for its stylistic elegance and poetic fantasy. The relationship between man and woman or some unattainable ideal in some cases dominates themes of Giraudoux .
Léger Giraudoux, father of Jean Giraudoux, worked for the ministry of transport. Giraudoux studied at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux and upon graduation traveled extensively in Europe. After his return to France in 1910 -
Jean Hatzfeld
Jean Hatzfeld is a journalist. He worked for many years as a war correspondent for Libération, a French newspaper, before leaving to focus on reporting the Rwandan genocide.
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Gurgen Mahari
Gurgen Mahari (Gurgen Grigori Ajemian) was an Armenian writer and poet.
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In 1915 during the Armenian genocide Gurgen's family emigrated to Russia. His first book, Titanic was published in 1924. Then he wrote his autobiographical trilogy which tells his story of survivor and the tragedy experienced by Armenians in Western Armenia.
He was arrested by Soviet secret police at the period of Stalinism and released after Joseph Stalin's death (Mahari was sentenced to 10 years' confinement in 1937, returned in 1947 and one year later exiled again). -
Régis Debray
Intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia.
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Philippe Jaccottet
Philippe Jaccottet was a Swiss Francophone poet and translator.
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Simon Leys
Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. He died in Sydney in 2014.
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Writing in three languages - French, Chinese and English - he played an important political role in revealing the true nature of the Cultural Revolution. His many prizes include the Prix Renaudot, Prix mondial Cino Del Duca and the Christina Stead Prize. -
Hubert Aquin
Hubert Aquin was a Quebec novelist, political activist, essayist, filmmaker and editor.
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Aquin graduated from the Université de Montréal in 1951. From 1951 to 1954, he studied at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris. On his return to Montreal worked for Radio-Canada from 1955 until 1959.
From 1960 to 1968, Aquin was active in the movement for Quebec independence. He was an executive member of the first independentist political party, the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale (1960–1969). In 1964, he announced that he was going "underground" to work for independence through terrorism; he was arrested shortly thereafter and detained for four months in a psychiatric hospital. It was there that he wrote his first novel, Prochain épisode -
René Char
René Char spent his childhood in Névons, the substantial family home completed at his birth, then studied as a boarder at the school of Avignon and subsequently, in 1925, a student at L'École de Commerce de Marseille, where he read Plutarch, François Villon, Racine, the German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire.
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His first book, Cloches sur le cœur was published in 1928 as a compilation of poems written between 1922 and 1926. In late November 1929, Char moved to Paris, where he met Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel, and joined the surrealists. He remained active in the surrealist movement through the early 1930s but distanced himself gradually from the mid-1930s onward. Throughout his career, Char's -
Aloysius Bertrand
Louis Jacques Napoléon Bertrand, better known by his pen name Aloysius Bertrand (20 April 1807 — 29 April 1841), was a French Romantic poet, playwright and journalist. He is famous for having introduced prose poetry in French literature, and is considered a forerunner of the Symbolist movement. His masterpiece is the collection of prose poems Gaspard de la Nuit published posthumously in 1842 (but probably mostly written already in 1827); though relatively ignored at the time, the book later had a huge influence on Charles Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris, the Symbolists and on the Surrealist movement. Three of its poems were adapted to an eponymous piano suite by Maurice Ravel in 1908.
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Pierre de Ronsard
Lyrical love poems, considered best works of French poet Pierre de Ronsard, include Sonnets pour Hélène (1578).
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Pierre de Ronsard est un des poètes français les plus importants du XVIe siècle.
« Prince des poètes et poète des princes », Pierre de Ronsard, adepte de l’épicurisme, est une figure majeure de la littérature poétique de la Renaissance. Membre de la Pléiade, auteur d’une œuvre vaste qui, en plus de trente ans, a touché aussi bien la poésie engagée et « officielle » dans le contexte des guerres de religions avec les Hymnes et les Discours (1555-1564), que l’épopée avec La Franciade (1572) ou la poésie lyrique avec les recueils des Les Odes (1550-1552) et des Amours (Les Amours de Cassandre, 1552 ; Les Amours de Marie, 1555 ; Sonn -
Sarah Cohen-Scali
Sarah Cohen-Scali is a French writer. She also publishes under the pseudonym Sarah K. She holds a degree in philosophy and studied dramatic arts before beginning her career writing for children. She has published around twenty books for young readers as well as for adults, particularly crime novels. She began writing at the age of 29.
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Khachik Dashtents
Khachik Dashtents was born in a shepherd's family on May 25, 1910 in the Dashtadem village of Ottoman Empire's Bitlis Vilayet in Western Armenia (current-day Turkey). After the Armenian Genocide, he moved to Soviet Armenia and graduated from the Yerevan State University (1932), and then from the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages. Dashtents has authored poetry collections ("Songbook", 1932; "Spring Songs", 1934; "Fire", 1936), "Tigran the Great," a historical drama (1947), translations of William Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Saroyan. The "Khodedan" (1950) and "Call of Plowmen" (published posthumously, in 1979) novels tell the tragic story of Western Armenians during World War I.
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Dashtents died in Yerevan, Armenia on -
Vakhtang Ananyan
Vakhtang Stepani Ananyan was an Armenian writer. Ananyan was born in Poghoskilisa village, near Dilijan. His first work was published in the journal Pioner in 1927. He was a participant of World War II. He was awarded the Armenian State Prize in 1970. He died in 1980 in Yerevan, where a school is named after him.
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Sero Khanzadyan
Sero Khanzadyan was born in 1915 to the family of a ploughman in the town of Goris which is located in the rough mountains of Zangezur, where every bit of fertile ground is taken in a battle against solid rocks and burning sun.
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Little Sero’s parents used to tell him "You will learn the value of the land once you grow up". Many times he had noticed how people, returning from work in the field, would keep the pieces of ground stuck to their clothes and shake it off on a naked rock in front of their houses. "The land is the dearest thing that we have. Without the land there is no nation" – would be the words said by the characters of his novels.
Upon his graduation from the pedagogical college the young man worked as a schoolteacher. At the age -
Lucie Pierrat-Pajot
Lucie Pierrat-Pajot est née en 1986 à Nevers. Elle grandit dans la campagne bourguignonne, entre champs et forêts. Pour s'occuper, elle aime grimper aux arbres et vivre des aventures imaginaires en compagnie de sa soeur. La vie quotidienne lui semblant quelque peu étriquée, elle tombe très tôt dans l'addiction à la lecture afin de combler son appétit pour les voyages immobiles. Elle fait plusieurs détours dans diverses régions de France avant de s'installer dans l'Yonne avec son mari et sa fille, où elle travaille actuellement comme professeur-documentaliste dans un collège. Après avoir tenté sa chance lors de la première édition du concours, elle décide de participer à nouveau avec «Les Mystères de Larispem» et devient la grande lauréate d
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