Yves Bonnefoy (1923–2016) was a French poet, essayist, and translator born in Tours. His first major collection was Du Mouvement et de l'Immobilité de Douve (Mercure de France, 1953). Elected to the Collège de France in 1981, he held the Chair of Comparative Studies of the Poetic Function until 1993, and he taught at Yale, Brandeis, and the City University of New York, among others. He received the Prix Goncourt de la poésie in 1987, the Franz Kafka Prize in 2007, and the Griffin Trust Lifetime Recognition Award in 2011. He translated Shakespeare, Yeats, and Petrarch into French and wrote extensively on art and poetics.
