Jean Portante

Jean Portante (born 19 December 1950 in Differdange) is a Luxembourgish writer who resides in Paris. He has written novels, stories, plays, journalistic articles and poetry, and has been widely translated.

Numerous books have been 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). Provided by Wikipedia