Marie Etienne is the author of eight collections of poems, five novels, and two books on the theater. She spent her childhood in Indochina, in what is now Viet Nam, during the Second World War and the beginning of the Viet Minh struggle for independence. Read More These origins are the basis of her novels Sensö: la guerre and L'Enfant et le soldat--kaleidoscopic impressions of the war and of the multiple displacements of a child between cultures. Her own education continued in France and in Dakar, and she has remained a traveler and an ambassador between literary cultures all her life. Since her debut as a writer connected with the OuLiPo movement, a synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, of the tragic and the mundane, of the quotidian transformed by the prisms of myth and history, have been present in Marie Etienne's poetry. So is a verbally theatrical framework of invented fixed forms for snatches of narrative that veer from the ordinary to the surreal, from the urban present to an oneiric time-beyond-time.