Marie Étienne is a French
poet
A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...
and
novelist
A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to ...
. In 2009, her book ''Roi des cent cavaliers'' (published in France in 2002) and now translated into English as ''King of a Hundred Horseman'' won the
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
[Marilyn Hacker: King of a Hundred Horsemen received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation]
Étienne is the author of eleven books of poems and nine books of prose, which her translator
Marilyn Hacker says "could be variously classed as fiction, memoir, and cultural history, some partaking of all three".
From 1979 to 1988, Marie Étienne worked as assistant to the innovative French theater director
Antoine Vitez
Antoine Vitez (; 20 December 1930 – 30 April 1990) was a French actor, director, and poet. He became a central character and influence on the French theater in the post-war period, especially in the technique of teaching drama. He was also tr ...
, whose courses on the theater she had followed as part of her doctoral thesis research, at the Théâtre d’Ivry and the
Théâtre national de Chaillot
The Théâtre National de Chaillot (English: Chaillot National Theatre) is a theatre located in the Palais de Chaillot at 1, place du Trocadéro, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Close by the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro Gardens—the Th ...
.
Her work with Vitez, including transcriptions of her notebooks of the era, resulted in ''Antoine Vitez: Ie roman du théâtre'' (2000), a book Hacker describes as "in a genre Americans would call literary memoir published a decade after the director’s death and almost twenty years after their collaboration. It offers an invaluable ''