The artistic director of Spring of Poets has resigned, we learned this Friday.
A collective of 1,200 actors from the world of culture opposed the choice of Sylvain Tesson as sponsor of this annual event in an article published Thursday by Libération.
The signatories, including the authors Baptiste Beaulieu and Chloé Delaume, believed that this “reinforced the trivialization and normalization of the extreme right in the political and cultural spheres, and in society as a whole”.
The petitioners accuse the 51-year-old travel writer, winner of the Renaudot Prize in 2019 for “The Snow Panther”, of being a “leading figure of (the) ‘literary extreme right’”.
He notably prefaced several novels by Jean Raspail, a monarchist and traditionalist Catholic writer, admired by identitarians, who died in 2020.
The Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, as well as Bruno Le Maire had given their support to Sylvain Besson.
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