Jean Portante

Jean Portante was born in Differdange, Luxembourg, and now lives in Paris. He has written novels, stories, plays, journalism and poetry, and has been widely translated, including in English Point/Erasing, translated by Anne Marie Glasheen (Daedalus, 2003) and In Reality, translated by Zoë Skoulding (Seren Press, 2013). He is a translator of poetry into French from Spanish, Italian, English and German. His novels include Mrs Haroy ou la mémoire de la baleine (Editions Phi, 1997) among others, which has been translated into many languages, and he is also the author of the biography Allen Ginsberg: L'autre Amérique (Le Castor Astral, 1999). Portante’s collection of poems L’Etrange langue (Editions Le Taillis Pré, 2002) won the Mallarmé award in France in 2003, and the same year he was given the Grand Prix d’Automne de la Société des Gens de Lettres for his entire life’s work in poetry. In 2005, Le Castor Astral published a selected poems, La Cendre des mots, covering his work from 1989 to 2005. Since 2006 he has been a member of the Académie Mallarmé. In 2008 he co-founded the French poetry magazine Inuits dans la jungle with the poet Jacques Darras, while in Luxembourg he heads the literary magazine Transkrit. In 2011 he was awarded Luxembourg’s Batty Weber National Prize, which is given every three years for a life’s work. His latest books are En réalité (Editions Phi 2008); La réinvention de l'oubli (Editions le Castor Astral, 2010), Conceptions (Editions Phi, 2012) and Après le tremblement (Editions Le Castor Astral, 2013)

As he describes in his novel Mrs Haroy ou la mémoire de la baleine, from an early age he felt like a world citizen.

However, for Jean Portante, French is a language outside the dyad Italy-Luxembourg, a language learned, tamed, but which always remains to be conquered. Portante called it a "strange language" (the title of one of his collections which was awarded the French Prix Mallarmé in 2003).

Jean Portante started to write when he was 33 years. Before, he studied in Nancy, France. In 1983, when he wrote his first book of poems, Fire and mud, he moved to Paris. He translated works by Juan Gelman and Gonzalo Rojas into French.

Currently, he heads the Luxembourg collection Graphiti (poetry) editions. In France, he is a member of the Académie Mallarmé and the Prix Guillaume Apollinaire. In 2003 he received the Grand Award of the Society, for all his work, and the Prix Mallarmé. Previously, his novel "Mrs. Haroy or the memory of the whale" to be filmed in 2010 earned him Luxembourg's Servais Prize (best book of the year in any genre).

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