Bernard Marie Koltes

"Bernard-Marie Koltès sped through the age he lived in like a meteor. He lived 41 years, from 1948 to 1989, leaving not many works, comprised essentially of six pieces. Although his plays are constantly in performance in France and abroad, and Koltès is regarded as a major contemporary playwright, no one has yet written his biography. What drove me to write one is the unforgettable memory of how I felt when I first saw La Nuit juste avant les forêts at the Petit-Odéon in 1981. What came next proved that Koltès was an author of existential theatre with a magnificent sense of language, as wild and lyrical as the times we live in. How did the son of a right-wing officer, brought up in Metz, become this particular writer? What choices drove him? What sort of imagination forged him? This biography tries to answer these questions, while acknowledging that any life - and specially his - keeps secrets. "There's nothing interesting about my life," Bernard-Marie Koltès said shortly before his death from Aids. All that mattered to him was his works. He was right: his life was interesting because he wrote. And because he wrote that sort of theatre." Brigitte SalinoThis is the first biography of Koltès, published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of his death.Brigitte Salino is a theatre critic for Le Monde.