Francis Ponge

Francis Ponge (1899-1988) was born in Montpellier, France, and is most famously the author of The Voice of Things (1942), Soap (1967), The Making of the Prairie (1971).

During the Second World War, Ponge joined the French Resistance. He also worked for the National Committee of Journalists, and was literary and artistic director of the communist weekly newspaper L'Action. He left the Communist Party in 1947. From 1952 to 1967 he held a professorship at the Alliance Française in Paris, and was a visiting professor at Barnard College and Columbia University in the United States.

Awards made to Ponge include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Académie française's French National Poetry Prize, and the Grand prix of the Société des gens de lettres, and was a Commandeur of the Légion d'honneur.

For the last 20 years of his life Ponge was reclusive, living at his country house in Le Bar-sur-Loup, France,  where he died at the age of 89.