| Pierre Gamarra | |
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Pierre Gamarra |
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| Born | Pierre Albert Gamarra 10 July 1919 Toulouse, France |
| Died | 20 May 2009 Argenteuil, France |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | French |
| Genres | Novel, Children's literature, Poetry, Essay |
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| French literature |
| By category |
| French literary history |
| French writers |
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Chronological list |
| Portals |
| France · Literature |
Pierre Gamarra (Toulouse, July, 10, 1919 – Argenteuil, May, 20, 2009) was a French writer. He was a poet and novelist, but also a literary critic.
He is best known for his poems and novels for the youth. He has often depicted his native region of Midi-Pyrénées in his works. Pierre Gamarra was also chief editor and director of the literary review Europe.
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Pierre Gamarra was born in Toulouse in 1919. From 1938 until 1940, he was a teacher in the South of France. During the German Occupation, he joined various Resistance groups in Toulouse, involved in the writing and distributing of clandestine publications. This led him to a career as a journalist, and then, more specifically both as a writer and a literary journalist.
In 1948, he receives the Charles Veillon International Grand Prize in Switzerland for his novel La Maison de feu.[note 1] Members of the 1948 Veillon Prize jury included writers André Chamson, Vercors and Louis Guilloux.
In 1951, after having worked as a journalist in Toulouse, he is invited to collaborate with Louis Aragon to the literary journal Europe in Paris. He will later become the journal's editor-in-chief and will run it from 1974 until 2009 as its director. Under Pierre Gamarra's direction, Europe continued to follow the original spirit initiated by Romain Rolland at the creation of the journal. For instance, numerous issues were devoted to an extensive presentation of literatures from countries underrated on the international map of Letters. For more than 50 years he also contributed to each of the journal's issue with a review named The Typewriter[note 2] which shows the same international curiosity.[1]
His novels often take place in his native South-West of France : he wrote a novel trilogy based on the history of Toulouse, various novels depicting life in the Pyrenees; he is also the author of The Midnight Roosters,[note 3] set in the Aveyron in the era of the French Revolution. The book was adapted for the French television channel FR3 in 1973. The film was shot in the town of Najac with the actor Claude Brosset in the cast.[2]
Together with the realistic and quite classical style of his novels, the fact that most of their stories are located in that region contributed to his reputation as a regionalist writer with social concerns.
He died in May 2009, leaving a substantial body of work, as yet untranslated into English. The Britannica Online Encyclopedia sees in him a ″deligthful practitioner with notable drollery and high technical skills"[3] in the art of children's poetry and children's stories. His poems and fables written for children are well known by French schoolchildren.