Catherine François

Catherine François (Paris, 1953) has a degree in Literature from the University of Paris-Sorbonne and the Complutense University in Madrid. She has lived in Spain since 1975. She published her first articles in arts and literature magazines as Humo, Artefacto, Diwan, Número and Comercial de la Pintura. Her first book, La ciudad infinita (Pre-Textos, Valencia, 1992, translated by Santiago Auserón) is about the urban space and dreams. She has researched Ancient China and in 1999 she published Caminos bajo el agua, (Pre-Textos, Valencia, translated by the philosopher José Luis Pardo), where she recreates the legends around the Yellow River and Taoist thinking. Under the direction of poet Jenaro Talens, she published her memoirs about the learning of language during childhood (L'arbre absent, Editions du Pernoud, 2004), later published in Spanish with a prologue and a translation of Santiago Auserón (El árbol ausente, Demipage, 2009). She has translated a selection of Garcilaso de la Vega’s sonnets into French which was published by the magazine Po&sie, directed by the poet Miguel Deguy, with a prologue by the French academic Florence Delay. After various years researching the poetry of al-Andalus, she published Los reyes poetas (Demipage, 2014), a work that contains the dramatized stories of Al-Mutasim de Almería and Las pasiones de al-Mutamid, in which she reconstructs the historical figures of both kings and the atmosphere of the Andalusian literary courts along the 11th century. A chapter of this book was published in the second number of the French magazine Apulée, directed by the novelist Hubert Haddad. She is currently preparing a collection of stories and is finishing a book about the main traditions of Chinese thinking: Confucianism, Taoism and Chan Buddhism. 

Her fifth book, La senda de las nubes (translated by the musician and philosopher Santiago Auserón and the poet Jenaro Talens and published by Siruela in 2021), has received unanimous support from critics. In it, she follows the trail of three Ancient Chinese ways of thinking through the life and work of Confucius, Han dynasty historian and Confucian Sima Qian, the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, and poet and Buddhist hermit Han Shan. She is currently finishing her first novel (El comercio) and working on a collection of stories.

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BY CATHERINE FRANÇOIS:

El camino de las nubes
NON-FICTION, coming soon
Los reyes poetas
NON-FICTION, 2014
El árbol ausente
NON-FICTION, 2009
L'arbre absent
NON-FICTION, 2004
Caminos bajo el agua
NON-FICTION, 1999