François Cheng



François Cheng (born 30 August 1929) is a Chinese-born French academician, writer, poet, and calligrapher. He is the author of essays, novels, collections of poetry and books on art written in the French language, and the translator of some of the great French poets into Chinese.

Biography
Born in Nanchang, Jiangxi in 1929, Cheng traveled to France in 1948 at the age of nineteen. In his 2002 speech to the Académie française, Cheng said, "'I became a Frenchman in law, mind and heart more than thirty years ago [...] especially from that moment when I resolutely went over to the French language, making it the weapon, or the soul, of my creative work. This language, how can I say everything that I owe to it? It is so intimately bound up with the way I live and my inner life that it has proved to be the emblem of my destiny.'"

Cheng's first works were academic studies about Chinese poetry and painting. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he worked with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan on studying and translating texts from the classical Chinese canon. These exchanges informed Lacan's late teaching on psychoanalytic interpretation. Later he began to write poems in French, before finally turning to the writing of novels.

Cheng won the 1998 Prix Femina for his novel Le Dit de Tianyi ("The Tale of Tianyi") (Albin Michel, Paris, 1998). In 2002 he was elected to the Académie française, the first person of Asian origin to be so honored. Since 2008, he has been a member of the Fondation Chirac's honour committee.

Marriage and family
Cheng married a painter who was also a Chinese national. They became French citizens and had a family. Their daughter Anne Cheng, born in Paris in 1955, also became an academic and sinologist.