Alain Borer grew up in Luxeuil-les-Bains (Franche-Comté), before moving to Geneva to study at the Institut Florimont (1965—69), Nancy (Lycée Poincaré, 1970), Paris (Lycée Henri IV, 1971), the University of Paris (Université Paris Diderot) and Paris X-Nanterre. He lived for some time in Croatia (1974—80), and Rome (1986—89). He received the French honor of “Chevalier” in 1985, then “Officier of Arts and Letters” in 1991. He is President of the “Printemps des poètes,” and in 2005, received the Edouard Glissant prize (awarded by Université de Paris VIII)) for the entirety of his work. After winning the Joseph Kessel prize for his novel Koba (2003), he became the 70th laureate of the prestigious annual Apollinaire prize for Icare & I don't.(Seuil) See: Prix Apollinaire
The name of Alain Borer is associated with that of Arthur Rimbaud, to whom he has devoted thirty years of his life. Aged 17, Alain Borer directed Le Bateau ivre, a student journal at the Institut Florimont in Geneva; aged 27 he travelled to Harar in Ethiopia (the same age as Rimbaud was when he arrived here) as part of a film-making expedition with Léo Ferré (the film “Le Voleur de feu” was aired on French television in 1978). Alain Borer is the author of two books which have become classic references in Rimbaud studies; an album-book Un sieur Rimbaud, se disant négociant, with Philippe Soupault (Lachenal & Ritter, 1984), and his combined essay and travel journal Rimbaud en Abyssinie (Fiction & Cie, 1984, et Points-Seuil, 2004). Aged 37 (the age of Rimbaud’s death), Alain Borer completed his book publications on the man with the “soles of wind”; Adieu à Rimbaud and L’?uvre-vie, 1991, is an original monument of a publication marking the centenary of Rimbaud’s death and which sheds considerable new light upon Rimbaud’s universe, and which breathed considerable life into scholarship on the poet.
On reading the entirety of Rimbaud’s work (the “rimbaldothèque”) Alain Borer is not only the first to have traced the physical footsteps of Rimbaud’s world journeys (in what he has termed the “Rimbaldie”), but also to have developed and forged the necessary concepts (the paradigm of the Oeuvre-Vie, “the major signifier”) permitting him to theorize and unlock the secrets of “this wild parade” (Rimbaud, l'heure de la fuite, Gallimard, 1991, with an introduction by Hugo Pratt).
Alain Borer is also a novelist (Koba, Seuil, collection “Fiction & Cie”), art critic (Dürer, 1980, Chambord, Monum, Hugo Pratt, Casterman), particularly on Joseph Beuys (Joseph Beuys, published by the Centre Pompidou, 1994, and La Bibliothèque des Arts, Lausanne, 2001), essayist (Saint-Martin ou la coupabilité, musée de Tours), playwright (Paul des oiseaux, Le Chant du Rien visible, Fourbis, Le Quadrige invectif, Le cercle d’art, 2005, assembled together in Icare & I don't, Seuil, 2007), and world traveler and travel-writer (Sarajevo, Gallimard, Liberia, Michalon, Los Angeles, Phébus, Pacific Palisades, writings about which are due to be published by Seuil).
As a poet (Pour l'amour du ciel, CD Radio France, the Poétiques Collection), Alain Borer is joined by André Velter and Zéno Bianu in the Groupe Actéon. The group has three major preoccupations: an astrophysical obsession with “extreme travel” (Le Nuage de Magellan, Zone bleue), a “pataphysical” dimension (Bestiaire, Alexandrins fortuits), as well as poetic texts stripped to their bare essentials, which they have termed “noems” (Jeil, 2004, Loups plats, 2006).
After François Coupé (1973), Alain Borer has made “book-objects,” collages (Calme, 1987), and numerous books in collaboration with artists (for example, on Touareg jewellery with Kaïdin), which he signs off under the pen name “Jaseur boreal.” An exposition of his photographs, La Sanglinière, was presented in the château de Tours in April 2007.
It is poetry, however, which infiltrates all of Alain Borer’s writings. His latest work, Icare & I don't (Seuil, 2007), “a metaphysical vaudeville,” illustrates this rare alliance of poetry and wit, of lightness and depth, whose tone should give life to works of “allegro serioso” — a program about which Roland Barthes wrote: “With you, the art of living and the art of writing merge.”His work includes a number of prefaces to books and art catalogues, book collaborations and collaborative reviews; a recent catalogue [G. Tran Din Mahe, 2008] lists approximately one thousand publications by one hundred publishers, in addition to forty television programs (Apostrophes in 1984 et Bouillon de culture in 1991), about a hundred radio shows (principally on France Culture), two hundred and fifty conferences and public lectures in one hundred different towns and thirty universities in about thirty countries. His work is the subject of more than six hundred press articles.
