Frankétienne

Frankétienne (born Franck Étienne on April 12, 1936, in Ravine-Sèche, Haiti) is a Haitian writer, poet, playwright, painter, musician, activist and intellectual. He is recognized as one of Haiti's leading writers and playwrights of both French and Haitian Creole, and is "known as the father of Haitian letters". As a painter, he is known for his colorful abstract works, often emphasizing the colors blue and red. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres (Order of the Arts and Letters), and was named UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2010.

Early life
Frankétienne was born in Ravine-Sèche, a small village in Haiti. He was abandoned by his father, a rich American industrialist, at a young age and was raised by his mother in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, where she was a respected entrepreneur, owning her own business to support her eight children, managing to send him, who was the eldest, to school.

He first began writing poetry around 1960. He published his first texts in 1964 and 1965. His first novel, Mûr a créver, was published in 1968. From 1977 onward he found success in theater.

Selected works

 * Au Fil du Temps, a compilation of poems
 * Ultravocal, a novel
 * Pèlin Tèt, a play written in Haitian Creole
 * Dézafi, a novel about life during under the Duvalier regime, the first ever in Haitian Creole
 * Mûr à Crever, a novel
 * Les Affres d'un Défi, a novel
 * Désastre (12 janvier 2010), painting
 * Difficile émergence vers la lumière, painting