Alain Borer


Alain Borer, is a French poet, art critic, essayist, novelist, playwright, writer-traveler, signatory of the :fr:Littérature-monde|Littérature-monde manifesto, and eminent authority on the works of Arthur Rimbaud. He has been Professor of Art at L'École supérieure des beaux-arts de Tours since 1979 and Visiting Professor of French Literature at the University of Southern California since 2005. He recently received the Kessel Prize for his novel Koba, as well as the 70th :fr:Prix Apollinaire|Prix Apollinaire for his play Icare & I don't. In 2010, Alain Borer was awarded the 10th Pierre Mac Orlan Prize for Le Ciel & la carte, carnet de voyage dans les mers du Sud à bord de La Boudeuse, and the Maurice Genevoix Prize from the Académie Française in 2011. Alain Borer was made a Knight, then Officer of Arts and Letters in the French Legion of Honour, and is President of the Printemps des Poètes association. Alain Borer additionally received the Édouard Glissant Prize in 2005, awarded by the University of Paris VIII for all of his achievements.

Biography

Alain Borer grew up in Luxeuil-les-Bains, before moving to Geneva to study at the Institut Florimont, Nancy, Paris, the University of Paris and Paris X-Nanterre. He lived for some time in Croatia, and Rome. He currently resides in the French town of Chaumussay, in Touraine.

Works

The name of Alain Borer is associated with that of Arthur Rimbaud, to whom he has devoted thirty years of his life. Aged 17, Alain Borer directed Le Bateau ivre, a student journal at the Institut Florimont in Geneva; aged 27 he travelled to Harar in Ethiopia as part of a film-making expedition with Léo Ferré. Alain Borer is the author of two books which have become classic references in Rimbaud studies; an album-book Un sieur Rimbaud, se disant négociant, with Philippe Soupault, and his combined essay and travel journal Rimbaud en Abyssinie. Aged 37, Alain Borer completed his book publications on the man with the "soles of wind"; Adieu à Rimbaud and L'Œuvre-vie, 1991, is an original monument of a publication marking the centenary of Rimbaud's death and which sheds considerable new light upon Rimbaud's universe, and which breathed considerable life into scholarship on the poet.
On reading the entirety of Rimbaud's work Alain Borer is not only the first to have traced the physical footsteps of Rimbaud's world journeys, but also to have developed and forged the necessary concepts permitting him to theorize and unlock the secrets of "this wild parade".
Alain Borer is also a novelist, art critic, particularly on Joseph Beuys, essayist, playwright, and world traveler and travel-writer.
As a poet, Alain Borer is joined by André Velter and Zéno Bianu in the Groupe Actéon. The group has three major preoccupations: an astrophysical obsession with "extreme travel", a "pataphysical" dimension, as well as poetic texts stripped to their bare essentials, which they have termed "noems".
After François Coupé, Alain Borer has made "book-objects," collages, and numerous books in collaboration with artists, which he signs off under the pen name "Jaseur boreal." An exposition of his photographs, La Sanglinière, was presented in the château de Tours in April 2007.
It is poetry, however, which infiltrates all of Alain Borer's writings. His latest work, Icare & I don't, "a metaphysical vaudeville," illustrates this rare alliance of poetry and wit, of lightness and depth, whose tone should give life to works of "allegro serioso" – a program about which Roland Barthes wrote: "With you, the art of living and the art of writing merge."
His work includes a number of prefaces to books and art catalogues, book collaborations and collaborative reviews; a recent catalogue lists approximately one thousand publications by one hundred publishers, in addition to forty television programs, about a hundred radio shows, two hundred and fifty conferences and public lectures in one hundred different towns and thirty universities in about thirty countries. His work is the subject of more than six hundred press articles.

Selected publications

;In the USA
;Novels
;Theater
;Essays on Rimbaud
;Essays on Art
;Poetry
;Audiovisual
;Expositions