Jean Orizet

Jean Orizet was born on 5 March 1937 at Saint-Henry, between L'Estaque and Marseille. His father, Louis Orizet, was an agricultural engineer; his mother taught mathematics. During the Second World War the family moved to Dijon and then to Macon, where he attended the Lycee Lamartine and discovered Gerard de Nerval through a literature teacher. A childhood journey to Roman sites in North Africa sharpened a lasting taste for ruined cities and deep time. In 1953 a scholarship took him for a year to Saint Andrew's School on the American East Coast. He later studied languages in Madrid and at the interpreters' school in Geneva, then entered Sciences Po in Paris in 1958. After military service as a transport officer and English instructor, he published his first collection, Errance, in 1962.

Orizet briefly worked for the Ricard company in Marseille, then helped his father with Beaujolais vineyards and wine writing before settling in Paris. In 1969 he co-launched Poesie 1 with Michel and Jean Breton. In 1975 he and Philippe Heracles founded Les editions du Cherche midi, which he directed until its sale to Editis in 2005. He wrote poetry chronicles for Figaro Magazine (1984-1994), sat on numerous literary juries, and undertook cultural missions for the Alliance francaise and the French foreign ministry. Central to his thought was "entretemps", a concept of intervening time developed in Histoire de l'entretemps (1985) and later prose. He was elected to the Academie Mallarme in 1981 (later secretary-general and president), served as president of the French PEN Club (1993-1999), and in 2003 stood unsuccessfully for the Academie francaise seat formerly held by Leopold Sedar Senghor. His bibliography runs from Errance through dozens of collections, anthologies and art books, with work translated into more than twenty languages.

In 1967 Orizet met Isabelle Constantin, an administrator at the National Assembly; they married in June 1968 and had two daughters, Juliette (1969) and Anne (1970). From adolescence he painted in pastel, watercolour and oil as an amateur, and as an editor he published monographs and catalogue texts on painters. A friendship begun in Macon in 1954 with Claude Erignac lasted until Erignac's assassination in Ajaccio in 1998; Orizet answered that loss with Lettre a Claude Erignac, l'ami assassine (2003). In later years he held honorary roles at PEN Club francais, the Academie Mallarme, Biblionef and the Association des ecrivains combattants.

Jean Orizet died on 16 September 2026, aged 89. French outlets including BFM TV reported the death the following day, remembering him as a poet and as co-founder of the Cherche midi publishing house. Wikipedia and contemporary press give the date as 16 September 2026; a specific place of death was not stated in the principal English and French biographical notices reviewed for this page.

Orizet left a dual imprint: as an institution-builder who brought poetry magazines and a major independent imprint into French literary life, and as a poet-essayist of travel, painting and "entretemps". Critics such as Robert Sabatier praised the way mystery and a panicky sense of the universe meet in his inventories of nature and human making. His prizes from Marie-Noel to the Academie francaise's Grand Prix de poesie, and his state decorations through the Legion of Honour, mark a public recognition that matched a long private discipline of reading, editing and writing. Le Cherche midi and his anthologies remain part of how many French readers first meet poetry.