FRANCE:Julien Gracq, a reclusive French writer known for surrealism and who famously turned down France's highest literary award, died, aged 97, on Saturday.
Gracq, considered one of France's greatest writers of the 20th century, spent most of his life in retreat in the small village in western France where he was born.
Novelist, poet, playwright and critic, his literary debut came with At Argol's Castle, which sold only 150 copies and which he published in 1938 at his own costs.
Fiercely private, he stunned France for declining the Goncourt prize in 1951 for his masterpiece novel The Opposite Shore (Rivage des Syrtes) - a tale about collective suicide in an imaginary landscape.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon said yesterday that with Gracq's death "we lose a discreet man, an independent mind, a leading figure of contemporary French literature". President Nicolas Sarkozy called Gracq, author of 18 works, one the foremost French writers of the 20th century.
Gracq, whose real real name was Louis Poirier, was born in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, on the banks of the Loire river in the west of France.
He spent much of his life there in the house of his grandfather and died in a hospital in Angers. He had been living alone since his sister died in 1996.
A school teacher, he was a rare writer to be published in the prestigious Pleiade series while he was still alive.
His refusal to accept the Goncourt prize was based on his dislike of the publicity that he saw surrounding literature in the 1950s. He has seen his fears confirmed by the role that television has played in making authors and their books the subject of commercialism. He refused invitations to appear on French radio and television and politely turned down three invitations from President Mitterrand to dine at the Elysee.
Gracq was also a lucid critic. Perhaps the novelist and the critic came together best in the pieces that he wrote about London, after a visit in the summer of 1929. For Gracq, London was unknowable. He would ride in a bus until its finishing point, in some suburb. Then he would continue to walk in the same direction.
"The work of Julien Gracq is haughty but Louis Poirier is humble," said Jerome Garcin, one of the few people to have obtained an interview with him.