Poet Biography

Francis Combes

FRANCIS COMBES was born in the south of France in 1953, and lives in Aubervillier,
the “red belt” of Paris. He has published a dozen books of poetry, two novels and, with his journalist wife Patricia, an essay with the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. He knows English, German, Russian, Hungarian and Chinese and has translated works of Heine, Brecht and Mayakovsky. For more than a decade he has been in charge of the highly successful campaign of poster-poems in the Paris Metro system. As publisher of Le Temps des Cerises books, he has published Neruda, Cardenal, Dalton, Hirschman, and the monumental U.S. protest poetry anthology, Changing America. He is involved in the activities of the French Marxist Left for peace and democracy.