Pierre Vinclair is a writer and researcher. His encounter with Paterson in 2005 led him to question the conditions for conceiving a contemporary epic, which prompted him to write a doctoral thesis comparing the epic and the novel. Both a poet and a theorist, he is the author of some twenty works of poetry and literary criticism, including a line by line commentary of The Waste Land, titled Terre inculte. Penser dans l’illisible The Waste Land (Hermann, 2018), La Sauvagerie (José Corti, 2020), and Les œuvres liquides (Flammarion, 2025). His Habilitation thesis (HDR) focused on “the event of the poem”: how does the poem’s desire to become an event in itself enable or prevent it from responding to a historical event? Winner of the Heredia Prize from the French Academy (2014), Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters (2022), he translated the Shijing from Chinese, Horatius from Latin, or Alexander Pope and Derek Walcott from English. He was the Chief editor for the issue of the journal Europe dedicated to William Carlos Williams (2024).
