Olivier Barbarant

French poet, essayist and editor, born in 1966 in Bar-sur-Aube. The son of a teacher, he is now a professor at Lycée Lakanal in Paris. After spending years in Paris and Besançon, he settled permanently in Saint-Quentin in Picardy. He is one of France’s leading scholars of Louis Aragon and edited Aragon’s collected poetry for the prestigious Pléiade series published by Gallimard. As he puts it, his poetry draws from the same source as his critical work: a commitment to the “true colour” of language. He received the Tristan Tzara Prize in 1999 for Odes dérisoires and, in 2019, the prestigious Apollinaire Prize for Un grand instant, often described as the “Goncourt of poetry”. He is the author of the 2026 Open Letter to Europe.