Éric Sarner

Éric Sarner, born October 6, 1943 in Algiers, is a French poet and writer, also a journalist and documentary director. Trained in philosophy (Department of Multidisciplinary Studies of Cultures, Paris VIII), notably with Henri Meschonnic and in English, in France and in London. Since 2007, he has shared his life between Berlin, Montevideo (Uruguay) and Paris. He won the Tudor Arghesi Prize (Romania) in 2013. He received the Max Jacob Prize for his collection Cœurchronique in 2014.

Writer, poet, filmmaker, journalist, passionate about the great outdoors, this man with an impressive career takes his words, in his professional voice, to the four corners of the world. Born in Algiers in 1943, having lived in Marseille for a time and now residing on the heights of the port of Montevideo, Éric Sarner writes from port to port, ready to leave at any moment. He is the author of the very beautiful La passe du Vent, a travel story in the form of an investigation into the disappearance of the Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, assassinated in 1961 by the Duvalier regime in circumstances that have never been clarified.

Sugar, published in 2001, recounts in verse the life of the great black American boxer Ray “Sugar” Robinson, in a magnificent text since adapted for the theater. Fond of jazz, haunted by the spirits of Jack Kérouac, Elvis Presley or John Steinbeck, Éric Sarner never tires of traveling the United States from East to West along the “mother road”, the legendary road 66, to which he dedicated a documentary awarded by the SCAM in 2007 (Route 66, an American odyssey) and a book On Route 66 (Hoëbeke, 2009). A masterful work dedicated to the most legendary road of the 20th century, which was also one of the main paths to the reconquest of the imagination on the American continent.

Éric Sarner’s challenge in his writings is simple: to transmit his knowledge but also his questions, his observations, his surprises. “I like to be precise in the historical, geographical and political data that I give but I have no training as a historian – and I do not claim to be a historian at all – nor am I a political commentator , so much so that I rather let my pen and my sensitivity come to the surface (…). I let my heart go.” This is what he did in 2012 with Un voyage en Algéries, where impressions of travel and the floating memory of a childhood spent in this country that he left very young combine. Before 2011, Algeria, he says he did not know it. He discovers a complex country, plural in its languages, its climates, its inhabitants: Algeria, therefore. This book is a call to travel, to discovery. Eric Sarner’s ambition is simple: “The destinies of Algeria and France are forever linked, and their histories are linked: we do not know this enough, neither in Algeria nor in France. It’s about knowing yourself better. If the book can also be used for that, I will be very happy.” In 2017, Eric Sarner returns with a new book that invites you to travel Look through the window or “Travel story from Montevideo to Ushuaïa via Rio. »