Jacques Réda

Jacques Réda (1929–2024), born in Lunéville, France, was a poet and essayist and one of the most distinctive lyric voices in contemporary French literature. From 1987 to 1995 he served as editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française at Gallimard.

His poetry grows from three sustaining passions: the act of walking — particularly through Paris and its outskirts — jazz, and the observation of natural and urban landscapes. His movement through the city is the structural principle of his work: the walker's pace sets the rhythm of the sentence, and what the walker sees — a patch of light on a pavement, a canal, a suburban lot — becomes the occasion for a notation that is at once precise and metaphysically charged. Key collections include Amen (Gallimard, 1968), Récitatif (1970), La Tourne (1975), and Hors les murs (1982). His essays on jazz — collected in L'Improviste (1980) and Jouer le jeu (1985) — are among the most sensitive and musically attentive writing on the subject in French.

In 1993, he received the Grand Prix de poésie de l'Académie française and the Prix Goncourt de la poésie for the entirety of his work. Réda published more than thirty collections of poetry and prose over six decades, until his death in Hyères in 2024.