Jacques Chessex

Jacques Chessex (Payerne, 1 March 1934 – Yverdon-les-Bains, 9 October 2009) was a Swiss author and painter.

Chessex was born in 1934 in Payerne. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at Collège Saint-Michel in Fribourg, before undertaking literature studies in Lausanne. In 1953, he co-founded the literary review Pays du Lac in Pully. In 1956, Chessex's father committed suicide, making a lasting impression on him. He completed his studies in 1960.

In 1963, Chessex was awarded the Schiller Prize for La Tête ouverte. The next year, he co-founded the literary review Écriture in Lausanne. From 1969, he held a position as a French literature professor in the Gymnase de la Cité in Lausanne.

In 1972, he was awarded the Alpes-Jura prize. The next year, he obtained the Prix Goncourt for the novel L'Ogre. It was translated by Martin Sokolinsky and published in 1975 under the title A Father's Love and reissued in 2012 under a new title The Tyrant. In 1992, he obtained the Mallarmé Prize for poetry for Les Aveugles du seul regard, as well as the Grand Prize of the Fondation Vaudoise pour la création artistique. In 1999, he was awarded the Grand Prix de la langue française, and the Goncourt poetry grant for Allegria.

In 2007, he was awarded the Grand Prix Jean Giono for his entire work.

One of Chessex's last books A Jew Must Die (Un Juif pour l'exemple), published 2008, focussed on the 1942 death of cattle trader Arthur Bloch, who was killed by Swiss Nazis in Chessex's home town of Payerne. The novel, like others in his back catalogue, was not warmly received in Switzerland. A play adapted from his 1967 novel The Confession of Father Burg had just had its premiere the night before his death.

Chessex suffered a heart attack and collapsed during a public discussion in Yverdon-les-Bains on 9 October 2009 about a play The Confession of Father Burg, and about his support for Roman Polanski (who was arrested in September 2009 by Swiss police because of his outstanding U.S. warrant when he entered the country to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Zurich Film Festival). He died shortly thereafter. His literary estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.

Source: Article "Jacques Chessex" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.