Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 3

by Kenneth White, Cairns Craig (Editor)

Kenneth White achieved fame in his adopted country of France as a poet, essayist and travel writer. His status was confirmed in 1983 by his appointment as Professor of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne in Paris, from which position, in 1989, he founded the International Institute of Geopoetics which helped establish 'geopoetics', that White had first proposed in the 1970s, as a distinct and recognised discipline in the humanities. Between Two Worlds is White's account of how a working-class Scot from Ayrshire became a prominent figure in French cultural and intellectual life, despite having been sacked by the university where he was teaching for his part in the student revolt of 1968. It explains the intellectual energies that went into the creation of 'geopoetics' and the style and purpose of his distinctive mode of travel-writing. It is also the story of how he and his wife Marie-Claude set about bringing back to life abandoned properties in the Ardeche and in Brittan.

407 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 31, 2025

About the author

Kenneth White was a Scottish poet, academic and writer. He spent his formative years in Fairlie in Ayrshire.

White obtained a double first in French and German from the University of Glasgow. From 1959 until 1963, he studied at the University of Paris, where he obtained a state doctorate. He purchased Gourgounel, an old farm in the Ardèche region of France, where he could spend the summers and autumns studying and working on what would become Letters from Gourgounel.

In 1963, White returned to the University of Glasgow, where he lectured in French literature until 1967. Then, disillusioned by the contemporary British literary and poetry scene, he resigned from the University and moved to the city of Pau, near the Pyrenees, in south-west France, where he lectured in English at the University of Bordeaux. He was expelled from the University after his involvement in the student protests of May 1968. After leaving the University of Bordeaux, White remained at Pau and lectured at the University of Paris VII from 1969 until 1983, when he left the Pyrenees for the north coast of Brittany, and a new position as the chair of 20th century poetics at Paris-Sorbonne.

In 1989, White founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to further promote research into the cross-cultural, transdisciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade.

White held honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University. He was an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy, and a visiting professor at Scotland's UHI Millennium Institute.