Rennes (AFP)
The writer Michel Le Bris, who promoted a "world literature" and founder of the "Etonnants Voyageurs" festival, died at the age of 77 on the night from Friday to Saturday, we learned from his relatives and the president of the regional council of Brittany.
"I can confirm to you that Michel left last night after a long illness," someone close to the writer told AFP.
"It is with deep sadness that I learn of the death of Michel Le Bris. He who said + my Brittany is an island that contains all the others +, had understood the power of words, imagination, travel", said the president of the Brittany Regional Council Loïg Chesnais-Girard in a press release.
Born on February 1, 1944 in Plougasnou, near Morlaix (Finistère), in a very modest family, Michel Le Bris, after a detour through a high school in Versailles, graduated from HEC in 1967. He was quickly caught up in May 68 and the effervescence that will follow.
Director of The Cause of the People in 1970, he found himself eight months in prison at the Health for "offense of opinion".
Alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, he was also one of the founders of Liberation in 1973.
In turn journalist, producer, publisher, Stevenson specialist, passionate about pirates, Michel Le Bris has written numerous books.
But his great work will remain the Etonnants Voyageurs literature festival, subsequently extended to include images.
Anchored in Saint-Malo since its creation in 1990, the festival, of which he was still the director, has seen hundreds of writers from all over the world parade through its editions, which it has helped to make known in France.
Promoter of the manifesto "Pour une literature-monde", Michel Le Bris has always advocated "a literature of the open air", "a literature traveling, adventurous, open to the world, anxious to say it", "calling all the little ones to themselves children of Stevenson and Conrad around the world ".
All in opposition for a long time to a "certain confined environment" which then characterized Parisian literary circles in his eyes.
During these years, under the leadership of its founder, "Etonnants Voyageurs" put into practice this traveling and demanding literature.
In parallel to Saint-Malo, specific editions of the festival have emerged, among others, in Bamako, Sarajevo, Haifa, Brazzaville, Missoula (Montana), a melting pot of American "nature writers", and of course, Port-au-Prince (Haiti).
The festival, whose name draws its inspiration from a poem by Charles Baudelaire, was to celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2020, an edition canceled due to the health crisis.
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