biography
Martin Ziegler, born in 1956 in Stuttgart (Germany), French author [poetry].
Martin Ziegler started out with the desire to paint, a fact which sheds particular light on his career as an author. At 17, he left Germany and went to France to pursue multi-disciplinary studies: fine arts, literature and humanities. For six years he worked on a thesis with Michel Foucault about the concept of bios.
Martin Ziegler’s first book, La Suite des temps, was published by Editions de l'Aube in 1986. This short narrative came to the notice of such writers as Julien Gracq, André du Bouchet and Jean-Luc Nancy. From then on, he devoted himself to writing. In 1997, Ô ter abcède was published by L. Mauguin ; this is a poetic narrative in which preoccupations of poetry, philosophy and aesthetics are blended together in a way that is precise, elliptical, intense and moving.
Very quickly, several collections of his poetry appeared with the same publisher. In 1998, he won the Claude Sernet prize. In 2001, the publication of Chemins à fleur autrement blancs was noticed by Arlette Farge, who interviewed him at length on the France Culture national radio station, followed in 2002 by another very interesting interview with Alain Veinstein. Martin Ziegler has given many public readings in France but also elsewhere in Europe: in Prague for Friedrich Bödecker-Kreis (1998), at the Günter Grass Foundation (Bremen, 2005) ; and in 2003 he was awarded a prize by the European Authors’ Organization in Minden (Germany). In 2006 he was invited to read before an audience of students at the University of Heidelberg by Professor Gerhard Poppenberg, who also published translations of a selection of his poems in the famous magazine Akzente. In 2009 the professor invited him to Heidelberg again for a discussion meeting with the poet Durs Grünbein (Büchner prize, 1995).
During these years, Martin Ziegler’s interest in art and philosophy continued to flourish. He translated into French several speeches by Werner Hamacher, a philosopher close to Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy with whom he had brief but very important exchanges at a moment he considers to be the completion of the first phase of his work as a writer.
In late 2005, the collection of poems Comme il en irait du venir en souffrance, appeared. Writing about it in Les Cahiers critiques de poésie, M.F. Ehret said “Martin Ziegler’s writing is becoming even more rarefied, even though one would have believed it impossible. His poetry challenges us, it emphasizes nothing, and the invisible things it denotes are kept invisible.”
With his efforts to strip writing down to its barest extremes, Martin Ziegler seems to affirm the way that not everything can be said using language. It is in the spaces where language is absent that the truest form of poetry appears. This leads to two directions of work: writing nourished by words, but in which understanding takes place well beyond simple meaning; and the making of a first film where the image comes from refusing to force the image into a written framework : it is the latter work that is described throughout this blog.