Marie ÃÂtienne is a French poet and novelist. 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. ÃÂtienne 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 ÃÂtienne worked as assistant to the innovative French theater director Antoine Vitez, whose courses on the theater she had followed as part of her doctoral thesis research, at the Théâtre dâÂÂIvry and the Théâtre national de Chaillot. 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 directorâÂÂs death and almost twenty years after their collaboration. It offers an invaluable ' of a collaborative artistic endeavor and a signal era in contemporary French theater".
She was awarded the Prix Mallarmé for Anatolie in 1997 and the Académie Française's Prix Paul-Verlaine in 2011 for Le Livre des recels and Haute Lice; she also received the Prix Léopold Sedar Senghor for her body of work.
<blockquote>Originally published in French in 2002, Marie ÃÂtienneâÂÂs King of a Hundred Horsemen, translated by Marilyn Hacker, occupies an odd position somewhere between poetry and prose, observation and memory, dramatic enunciation and factual report. Although the opening sequence evokes the Parisian poetâÂÂs upbringing in French Indochina, the book is constructed around a deliberate lack of any anchoring subjectivity....</blockquote>
<blockquote>Marilyn HackerâÂÂs translation of Marie ÃÂtienneâÂÂs eleventh book of poems, King of a Hundred Horsemen, represents an ample first introduction to the work of this restlessly inventive French literary figure.</blockquote>