Mireille Vincendon
Mireille Vincendon, née Kramer (born 1910) was a French-language Egyptian writer.[1] She wrote two collections of poetry, short stories and a novel.[2]
Life
Mereille Kramer was born in Cairo in 1910 to an Egyptian mother and Russian father, and was educated at French schools.[2] She married Jacques Vincendon, director of the Land Bank of Egypt.[3]
Encouraged by the composer Florent Schmitt,[3] for whom she wrote words to be set to music, Vincendon took up literary activity in the late 1940s, publishing in the Egyptian French-language press. In 1956 she left Egypt and settled in Paris.[2]
Vincendon's poetry "revolves around existential concerns and the limits of language".[2] Like surrealist poetry, her free verse contained violent metaphor, though without surrealism's particular theoretical commitments.[4] Her novel Annabel's Notebooks mixed fantasy and reality to tell the story of a girl at a French-speaking boarding-school in Egypt.[2]
Works
- Le Dialogue des ombres [The Dialogue of Shades]. Paris: P. Seghers, 1953.
- Le Nombre du silence [The Number of Silence]. Paris: P. Seghers, 1955.
- Les Cahiers d'Annabelle [The Notebooks of Annabelle]. Paris: Mercure de France, 1957.
References
- Abdallah Naaman (2019). Les Orientaux de France - Ier-XXIe siècle. Éditions Ellipses. p. 193.
- Ghazoul, Ferial J. (2002). "Vincedon (sic), Mirielle (sic)". In Simon Gikandi (ed.). Encyclopedia of African Literature.
- Elwyn James Blattner (1955). Who's who in U.A.R and the Near East. Paul Barbey Press. p. 639.
- Mélusine No. 3: Marges Non-frontières. L'Age d'Homme. 1982. pp. 26–7.