Author of a major poetic œuvre of this last half-century, Claude Esteban wrote numerous essays on art and poetry and was the French translator, inter alia, of Jorge Guillén, Octavio Paz, Borges, García Lorca, or again, Quevedo.

Of Spanish father and French mother, divided between two idioms, Claude Esteban was marked by the painful feeling of a division and an exile in the language, which was at the source of his poetic vocation.

He also dedicated a monograph to Chillida, and to Palazuelo, and wrote prefaces for many exhibitions catalogs of painters such as Raoul Ubac, Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes, Castro, Fermín Aguayo, Giorgio Morandi, Josef Sima, Bacon, Giacometti, Braque, Le Brocquy, Chagall, etc.

In 1991, he received the France Culture Prize for Soleil dans une pièce vide (Sun in an empty Room), poetic narrations inspired by Edward Hopper's paintings.

It is still painting, that of the Faiyum portraits, which caused the writing of a splendid suite of poems, Fayoum, published in 2001 by Gallimard in Morceaux de ciel, presque rien (Pieces of sky, hardly anything), that earned him the Prix Goncourt of poetry.

He had been a student of the prestigious École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and was professor of Spanish literature at the Paris-Sorbonne University until 1996, and then he became President of the Maison des Ecrivains (the French Writers House) from 1998 to 2004.