Kenneth White

Professor Kenneth White (born April 28, 1936 in Glasgow, Scotland) is a poet, academic and writer.

Kenneth White was born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, but he spent his childhood and adolescence at Fairlie near Largs on the Ayrshire coast, where his father worked as a railway signalman. He obtained a double first in French and German from the University of Glasgow, and from 1959 until 1963 he studied at the University of Paris, where he obtained a state doctorate. He then returned to Glasgow and lectured in French literature at the University.

Disillusioned by the contemporary British literary and poetry scene, White resigned from the University of Glasgow in 1967 and moved to the city of Pau, near the Pyrenees, in south-west France.

In 1983, White was awarded the Prix Médicis étranger literary prize for La Route bleue.

White held the Chair of XXth Century Poetics at Paris-Sorbonne from 1983 to 1996. In 1989, White founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to further promote research into the field of Geopoetics, which he had been developing over the previous decade.

Kenneth White holds honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University, and is also an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy. He currently lives on the north coast of Brittany with his wife Marie-Claude, who is a translator and photographer.

Bibliography

Poetry

The Cold Wind of Dawn (1966)
The Most Difficult Area (1968)
Scènes d'un monde flottant (1976)
Terre de diamant (1977)
Mahamudra (1979)
Le Grand Rivage (1980)
Atlantica (1986)
The Bird Path: Collected Longer Poems (1989)
Handbook for the Diamond Country, Collected Shorter Poems 1960-1990 (1990)
Les Rives du silence (1998)
Limites et marges (2000)
Open Worlds: Collected Poems 1960-2000 (2003)
Le passage extérieur (2005)
L'anorak du goéland in L'Ermitage (2005)

Prose

Letters from Gourgounel (1966)
Les Limbes incandescents (1976)
La Route bleue (1983)
Travels in the Drifting Dawn (1989)
Les Cygnes sauvages (1990)
The Blue Road (1990)
Pilgrim of the Void (1992)
House of Tides: Letters from Brittany and Other Lands of the West (2000)
Across the Territories (2004)

Essays

Le plateau de l'albatros: Introduction à la géopoétique (1994)
On Scottish Ground (1998)
The Wanderer and His Charts (2004)

External links