Philippe Sollers

Philippe Sollers (; born Philippe Joyaux; 28 November 1936 – 5 May 2023) was a French writer, critic and editor.

Early life Sollers was born as Philippe Joyaux on 28 November 1936, in Talence, France. His family ran the local Société Joyaux Frères, the iron factory Recalt producing material for kitchens, metal constructions and machines for the aircraft manufacturer SNCASO under the German military administration in occupied France during World War II. His parents were Octave Joyaux and Marcelle Molinié. He moved to Paris in 1955 and studied at the Lycée privé Sainte-Geneviève of Versailles and at the ESSEC Business School.

In Portrait du Joueur (1985), Sollers reflects on his upbringing as the child of a prosperous bourgeois family, weaving in the stories and legends surrounding his ancestry. Though he initially pursued studies in economics, preparing to assume management of his father’s factory, his early literary influences soon steered him in a different direction. Guiding him along this new path was his first mentor, the poet Francis Ponge, whose support and influence proved decisive.

In 1960 he founded the avant garde literary journal Tel Quel along with writer and art critic Marcelin Pleynet, which was published by Le Seuil and ran until 1982. Sollers then created the journal L'Infini, published first by Denoël, then by Gallimard with Sollers remaining as sole editor and Pleynet as editorial secretary.

Sollers was at the heart of the period of intellectual fervour in the Paris of the 1960s and 1970s. He contributed to the publication of critics and thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes. Some of them were later described in his novel Femmes (1983), alongside other figures of French intellectualism active before and after May 1968.

Sollers's other novels include Women (1983), Portrait du joueur (1984), Le coeur absolu (1986), Watteau in Venice (1991), Studio (1997), Passion fixe (2000), and L'étoile des amants (2002), which introduced a degree of realism to his fiction, in that they make more explicit use of plot, character, and thematic development. They offer the reader a fictional study of the society in which he or she lives by reinterpreting, among other things, the roles of politics, media, sex, religion, and the arts.

Controversies In 1990, following a televised disagreement between Canadian novelist Denise Bombardier and the French writer Gabriel Matzneff over Matzneff's recently published memoir about his sexual relationships with young teenagers, a few days later, on the television channel France 3, Sollers referred to Bombardier as "a badly fucked bitch" (connasse mal-baisée).

Personal life Sollers married philosopher Julia Kristeva in 1967. He died on 5 May 2023, at the age of 86. For more than fifty years, he also had a relationship with the Belgian novelist Dominique Rolin (1913–2012).