Charles Juliet is gone.

copyright : Sylva Villerot Editions P.O.L 

Charles Juliet died in Lyon on July 26, as discreetly as he lived. He was about to turn 90. I met him last October, in a café, Place Carnot. He was extremely simple, humble, with a gentle smile contrasting with his ascetic appearance. He hugged me twice, very warmly to thank me for meeting him. I was in Lyon for work coming from the South; more precisely, from Aix-en-Provence, where he studied at the Lycée Militaire in a boarding school throughout all his secondary education. He was a “enfant de troupe”.  “L'année de l'éveil” in 1989 recounts this part of his life, with The Sainte Victoire mountain as a backdrop. Taken from his mother committed to a psychiatric hospital when he was just one month old, he was adopted almost immediately by a family of Swiss peasants, a loving family who would become his own. However, he would never cease to be haunted by his biological mother, who died of hunger and cold, like most psychiatric inmates under the Vichy regime. “Lambeaux”, published in 1995, is a hymn to this absent mother, whose existence he knew at the age of 7 when she was buried in 1942. 

His work published entirely by P.O.L, is extremely rich: novels, short stories, poetry, diaries, often autobiographical but so open to the Other that it makes him an unclassifiable writer with great rigor. He traveled to meet the Maoris in New Zealand and the Kanaks in New Caledonia. He admired the painters Soulages, Bram van Velde and Cézanne, and published “Cézanne Un Grand Vivant” in 2006. Quotations like “The last years of a life can be those when the flame rises, when it radiates its warmest light” page 51, “I want to be simple; those who know are simple”, page 52, illustrate his writing process, from the first volume of his 1957 diary, “Ténèbres en terre froide”, to the final volume, Journal X 2020, “Le jour baisse”.

Charles Juliet received the Goncourt poetry prize for “Moisson” in 2013 and the Grand Prix de l' Académie française for his body of work in 2017. His work has been translated into a multitude of languages: English, Spanish, Italian, German, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese... To read or reread.