Hédi Kaddour (Tunis, 1945) is one of the French writers currently designated as the new lyrical poets, a somewhat misleading name for a heterogeneous group that began releasing work through smaller publishing houses halfway through the 1980s and went on to appear with the major ones. Kaddour’s debut collection of poetry, Le chardon mauve, was published in 1987 by Ipomée. His breakthrough came two years later with his first book for Gallimard, La fin des vendanges, which received exceptionally favourable reviews. Kaddour, who is a university professor of French literature, is mainly interested in those poets of the great European tradition who have found their own way of “reducing the unified song of the nightingale to silence by deserting the place of the poet”. Currently Kaddour is concentrating on prose, and he was awarded the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for his novel Waltenberg (2005).