The Vertical Man

Lecture on Christian Bobin’s work

Christian Bobin lived near his birthplace, Le Creusot, in Saône-et-Loire, in a house in the heart of the forest, where he devoted himself entirely to writing. He is the author of some twenty books, the titles of which fit together like fragments of a single puzzle. His first texts, characterised by their brevity and somewhere between essay and poetry, date from the 1980s. In 1992, he achieved great success with a book dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi: Le Très-Bas (The Very Lowly). He received the Prix des Deux Magots by Gallimard and the 1993 Grand Prix Catholique de Litterature. In 2020, he was awarded the Prince Pierre Foundation Literary Prize for his life’s work.

Through the works of the great French poet and writer Christian Bobin, Javier Santiso will evoke, beyond their aesthetic and sensitive quality, a spiritual dimension rarely reached in contemporary literature.

Javier Santiso is a writer, poet and novelist. Born in France to Spanish parents, he writes in both French and Spanish. An economist by training, he has published several works with MIT, Oxford and Cambridge publishers.

Poetry and literature have been part of Javier Santiso’s life since his student days in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where he met writers such as Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, as well as poets Octavio Paz, Salah Stétié and Christian Bobin. In 2017, with the aim of translating Christian Bobin’s work into Spanish, he founded La Cama Sol, a publishing house dedicated to art and poetry. He has translated many of Bobin’s works. His first novel in French, Un pas de deux (2023), was shortlisted for the Prince Pierre Foundation Discovery Grant in 2024. He has also written several novels in Spanish, published by La Huerta Grande.

The lecture will be in French, with simultaneous interpretation into Estonian.