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KENNETH WHITE

Kenneth White was born on April 28, 1936 in Glasgow and died on August 11, 2023 in Trébeurden. Scottish by birth, French by choice, and global in his inspiration, Kenneth White is the author of an exceptional body of work in the complementary fields of essays, narratives and poetry. He has received numerous prestigious literary awards, from the Prix Médicis Étranger for The Blue Road to the Grand Prix du Rayonnement from the Académie Française for his entire body of work, as well as the Prix Roger Caillois and the Prix Édouard Glissant. From 1983 to 1996, White held the Chair of 20th-Century Poetics at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, and in 1989 he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics. But above all, and since his early years in Scotland, he has occupied a space — both singular and general — that is all his own, called intellectual nomadism, which he has presented in essays such as L’Esprit nomade and La Figure du dehors, and which he has experienced through itineraries taken across various territories around the world, recounted for example in The Winds of Vancouver and The Face of the East Wind. As for geopoetics, whose theory-practice he outlined in Le Plateau de l’Albatros and which he defined in Au large de l’Histoire, its aim is to reform culture by going back to the basis of all culture, which is to say the relationship between humankind and the Earth, which finds its ultimate expression in books of poems such as Mémorial de la Terre Océane.

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