Saint-John Perse

Who is Saint-John Perse?

Saint-John Perse, born Alexis Leger in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, on 31 May 1887, was a French poet and diplomat who became the only writer born in the French Caribbean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His family owned coffee and sugar plantations on the island before relocating to France in 1899, and the vivid tropical landscapes of his Guadeloupean childhood remained a lasting source of imagery in his poetry. He pursued a parallel career as a career diplomat, serving as a consul in China, where he wrote the celebrated epic poem Anabase, and later rising to secretary-general of the French Foreign Ministry. Stripped of his citizenship and dismissed from office by the Vichy government in 1940, he went into exile in the United States, working at the Library of Congress and continuing to write, publishing collections such as Exile and Other Poems. In 1960 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry," cementing his place as one of the twentieth century's major French-language poets. He died in France in 1975, but his birthplace in Guadeloupe still honors him as one of the island's most significant literary figures.

Sources: Britannica, "Saint-John Perse" · NobelPrize.org, "Saint-John Perse – Facts" · Encyclopedia.com, "St-John Perse"