Grégory Rateau

- France -

Grégory Rateau was born in 1984 in the Paris suburbs and now lives in Bucarest (Romania) as a media director. He is the author of a travel narrative about Romania, translated into Roman (Polirom). Then followed a first novel, Noir de soleil (“Black as Sun”, Maurice Nadeau editor, which was eligible for the France-Lebanon prize together with the Ulysse First Novel Prize, 2020), and several collections among which Imprécations nocturnes (“Night Curses”, Conspiration (Amélie Murat Prize and Renée Vivien Prize 2023, eligible for the Robert Ganzo Prize of the Festival Étonnants Voyageurs the same year). He is featured in many anthologies (including Castor Astral’s in 2024) and in about forty international magazines. In Festivals he reads his poems on stage. His second novel will be issued at the next autumn publishing season.


Born in 1984, Grégory Rateau grew up in Clichy-sous-Bois where he was lucky discovering literature at a very young age, together with jazz and cinematography. As a teenager, he broke away, walking, dreaming, producing short films (selected by fifteen international festivals), conducting cinema clubs in the Quartier Latin, teaching image exploration at the St-Sulpice high school, and at times working in farms (Lebanon, Ireland, Nepal). He is presently settled in Romania as a media director. He authored a travel narrative about Romania (Hors piste, “Off-road”), a best-selling in the Romanian version, followed by his first novel, Noir de soleil (“Black as Sun”, Maurice Nadeau, which was eligible for the France-Lebanon Prize together with the Ulysse First Novel Prize 2020).

His poetry started being published in 2022 with several collections among which Imprécations nocturnes (“Night Curses”, Conspiration (Amélie Murat Prize and Renée Vivien Prize 2023, eligible for the Robert Ganzo Prize the same year), and his latest, Le Pays incertain (“The Uncertain Country”, La Rumeur Libre). His poem Beyrouth has just been selected for the Arthur Rimbaud International Prize. Rateau’s poetry travels in several places and languages: in magazines (Arpa, Le Cafard Hérétique, Place de la Sorbonne, Le Journal des poètes, Verso…), in art books (Poème Païen, “Pagan poem”, L’œil de la méduse), anthologies (including in 2024 Ces Instants de grâce pour l’éternité, “Grace-filled Moments for Eternity”, Castor Astral, and Génération Manifeste, “Manifested Generation”, Éditions Manifeste). From time to time he returns to France for readings (Voix Vives de Méditerranée en Méditerranée in Sète, Sémaphore, Baie des plumes, Maison de la poésie (in Paris and Montpellier…). As an outraged poet, through his writing and exclusively in that manner, he remains a seeker of brotherhood wherever he can find it.

According to Jean-Baptiste Para, Managing director of the magazine Revue Europe, Grégory Rateau’s poetry is “a kaleidoscope, full of multiple sparks from the real world, in constant motion, with a sensitive resonance both in consciousness and body, caption of a day’s impromptu of which the poem keeps record for a long time – all of this occurring within the reader’s nurtured relationship with those poems as they (re)kindle his own vision of the world).”

According to Alain Roussel, a writer with the editor En Attendant Nadeau: “Distant from literary posturing and lounge celebrations, poetry that is still there, sulphury, thought and nerve consuming, throwing you panting and haggard on unknown paths where one walks with “bags full of anger”, from where some-times, mentally or physically, one never gets back, as with Nerval, Crevel, Duprey, Bosc, Rodanski, Artaud, Prevel. Such “society self-murdered ones” do not write for the sake of writing, but for breaching into one’s being and life, with the knife of both despair and rebellion. Oftentimes, they are rejected as plagued persons are. They are not heard. They are not listened to. True enough, they do not speak for audience and honors, but for a few, poets and readers, who thus form a “secret society of writers”, as the late Alain Jouffroy once put it.