Death of Venus Khoury-Ghata, great voice of French-speaking poetry

This prolific writer is one of the rare women to have been included in the “Poésie/Gallimard” collection during her lifetime. Venus Khoury-Ghata died Wednesday at the age of 88 in Paris, Mercure de France announced Thursday.

The poet and novelist, a figure in French-speaking letters, was born on December 23, 1937 in Lebanon, a country she left for Paris at the beginning of the 1970s. She then collaborated with the magazine Europedirected by Louis Aragon, which she translated into Arabic. She has published numerous novels, which probe the wounds of the condition of women. Among them, Seven stones for the adulterous woman et Marina Tsvetaeva, dying in Labora.

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Translated into many languages

Vénus Khoury-Ghata has above all signed around thirty collections of poems, such as Fables for a People of Clay et Ask the Dark. His work, translated into numerous languages, was awarded the Grand Prize for poetry of the Académie française in 2009 and the Goncourt de la voix in 2011 for Where do the trees go?. Awards to which must be added the Mallarmé and Apollinaire prizes.

With Venus Khoury-Ghata comes a world of “fragrant glades”of exile and strong women, of poetry and the Middle East. She “embodied better than anyone the meeting of France and Lebanon”said Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a tribute.