The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 3: Between Two Worlds: Autobiography

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.