Huge honor for Quebec poetry! Montreal poet Denise Desautels has just received the prestigious Apollinaire Prize in Paris for her most recent collection, Disappear: around 11 works by Sylvie Cottonpublished here at Le Noroît and, in France, by the publishing house L’herbe qui tremble.
Posted at 3:34 p.m.
Denise Desautels becomes only the second poet from Quebec, and the first Quebecer, to win the Prix Apollinaire. Gaston Miron received it in 1981 for his famous collection The raped manfirst published by Presses de l’Université de Montréal in 1970, then in France by Maspero.
In one year, various honors highlighted the illustrious career of Denise Desautels, who has published some thirty collections of poetry since 1975, as well as signed several artists’ books. Last fall, his collections The dark angle of joy (2011) and From which sometimes emerges an arm of the horizon (2017) entered the prestigious Poésie/Gallimard collection.
The poet, who knows how to “reinvent the heart and its beat with each sentence”, has been awarded some fifteen prizes since her debut, including the Grand Prize at the Trois-Rivières Poetry Festival (Lessons from Venice and Without you, I wouldn’t have looked so high), the Governor General’s Award (The leap of the angel) and the Athanase-David prize for his entire body of work.
His collection Vanish was inspired by 11 works by interdisciplinary artist Sylvie Cotton. The texts of this project designed for the journal Relationships in 2017-2018 have been revamped to create what is proving to be a model of fusion between poetry and the visual arts.
In a dazzling language, the poet intertwines the fire that consumes her with the pictorial works. Denise Desautels has always contemplated the end of existence with her eyes open, while dreaming of seeing the blue sky. She remains this rebel with a cause: to describe pain in order to transcend it.
Apollinaire Prize
The jury’s choices for the Apollinaire prize, known as French poetry and the French-speaking world, are made on the basis of the “originality and modernity” of the collections. The list of 10 finalists, including Denise Desautels’ book, was announced last June.
Established in 1941, this famous award has been attributed in the past to poets such as Pierre Seghers, Claude Roy, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Bernard Chambaz, René Depestre, Linda Maria Baros and Jean-Pierre Siméon who now chairs the jury.
The award ceremony has taken place since 2016 at the literary café Les Deux Magots, in Paris, where the poet Guillaume Apollinaire used to live. The jury has also been awarding a Discovery Prize for several years.