Pierre Gamarra Biography

Pierre Gamarra (10 July 1919 – 20 May 2009) was a French writer. He was a poet, novelist and literary critic.
He is best known for his poems and novels for the youth. He has often depicted his native region of Midi-Pyrénées in his works. Pierre Gamarra was also chief editor and director of the literary review Europe.

Pierre Gamarra was born in Toulouse in 1919. From 1938 until 1940 he was a teacher in the South of France. During the German Occupation, he joined various Resistance groups in Toulouse, involved in the writing and distributing of clandestine publications. This led him to a career as a journalist, and then, more specifically both as a writer and a literary journalist.

In 1948 Pierre Gamarra received the first Charles Veillon International Grand Prize in Lausanne for his first novel, La Maison de feu. Members of the 1948 Veillon Prize jury included writers André Chamson, Vercors, Franz Hellens and Louis Guilloux.

From 1945 to 1951 he worked as a journalist in Toulouse. In 1951 Louis Aragon, Jean Cassou and André Chamson offered him a position in Paris as editor-in-chief of the literary journal Europe. He occupied this position until 1974, when he became director of the journal. Under Pierre Gamarra's direction, Europe continued the project initiated in 1923 by Romain Rolland and a group of writers. For more than 50 years, Pierre Gamarra also contributed to most of the journal's issues with a book review column named The Typewriter which shows the same international curiosity.

His novels often take place in his native South-West of France: he wrote a novel trilogy based on the history of Toulouse and various novels depicting life in that town and in the Garonne region or in the Pyrenees.

John L. Brown in World literature today stated that Pierre Gamarra’s descriptions of Toulouse, its people and its region were ″masterly″, ″skillfully and poetically″ composed ″with a vibrant lyricism″.

Pierre Gamarra is also the author of The Midnight Roosters, a novel set in Aveyron during the French Revolution. The book was adapted for the French television channel FR3 in 1973. The film, casting Claude Brosset (fr), was shot in the town of Najac.

In 1955 he published one of his best known novels, Le Maître d’école; the book and its sequel La Femme de Simon (1962) received critical praise.

In 1961 Pierre Gamarra received the Prix Jeunesse (fr) for L'Aventure du Serpent à Plumes and in 1985, the SGDL Grand Prize for his novel Le Fleuve Palimpseste.

Pierre Gamarra died in May 2009, leaving a substantial body of work, as yet untranslated into English. The Encyclopædia Britannica sees in him a "delightful practitioner with notable drollery and high technical skills" in the art of children's poetry and children's stories. His poems and fables are well known by French schoolchildren.