Jean Portante

Jean Portante (born 19 December 1950 in Differdange) is a Luxembourgish writer who resides in Paris.

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.

In 2011 he was awarded Luxembourg’s Batty Weber National Prize, which is given every three years for a life’s work.

Portante called it a "strange language" (the title of one of his collections which was awarded the French Prix Mallarmé in 2003).

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).

In Luxembourg, he founded in 2009 the literary magazine Transkrit, dedicated to translating contemporary literature, and Phi.

[2] In France, he co-founded, with Jacques Darras and Jean-Yves Reuzeau, the journal Inuits dans la jungle, the first issue being published in June 2008.

The jury commented: "Since the beginning of the 1980s, Jean Portante has explored topics related to identity, from memory to forgetfulness, in various literary genres, especially poetry, the novel, drama and the essay.

His literary style continues to evolve, marked by strong intertextuality, providing access to new interpretations and inciting pluralized reading."

Luxembourg 1997 – Christ avec renard urbain, de John F. Deane, Editions PHI.