Edouard Glissant

Novelist, poet and essayist Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) is one of the great writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a young man in Martinique, Glissant was fascinated by the surrealist movement and, together with his friends from the Franc Jeu (a literary and political group), campaigned for the revolutionary ideas of colonial liberation. He left Martinique for metropolitan France in 1946 where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and ethnography at the Musée de l'Homme. He then published his first poetry collections (Un Champ d'îles in 1953) and his novel La Lézarde [translated into English by Frances Frenaye under the title The Ripening, published by G. Brazeller, New York.], which received the Prix Renaudot in 1958.

In 1965, Glissant returned to Martinique. In 1967, he created the Institut Martiniquais d'Études (IME), a private educational institution which aims to provide young Antilleans with an education that reflects the reality of their History and geography. In 1971, he founded the journal Acoma (published by Maspero), a critical research journal on Antillean societies, which already heralded one of his major essays in this field at that time, Le Discours antillais (1981) [translated by J. Michael Dash in Édouard Glissant, Caribbean discourse: selected essays, University of Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1989]. Through his essays, novels and poetic texts, which are interwoven, he gradually introduced the notion of Tout-Monde [the Whole-world], the title of the 1995 novel, followed by the essay Traité du Tout-Monde in 1997 [translated by Celia Britton, Treatise of the Whole-world, Liverpool University Press, 2020].

From 1980 to 1988, Glissant was Editor-in-chief of the UNESCO Courier, developing its editions in 36 languages, distributed in more than 150 countries. In 1988, Glissant moved to the United States and became Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at the Louisiana State University (LSU). In 1993, he was actively involved in the founding of the International Parliament of Writers, an international institution aimed at establishing solidarity with persecuted writers and intellectuals. In 2006, Glissant created the Institut du Tout-Monde, with the support of the Conseil Régional d'IIe de France, the Ministère de l'Outre-Mer, and the Maison de l'Amérique Latine.

In 2009, Glissant published his last essay, Philosophie de la Relation, subtitled Poésie en étendue, and as his final work in 2010, La terre, le feu, l'eau et les vents – Une anthologie de la poésie du Tout-monde.