Robert Pinget

Robert Pinget (French pronunciation: [ʁɔbɛʁ pɛ̃ʒɛ]; 19 July 1919 – 25 August 1997) was a Swiss-born French novelist and playwright associated with the nouveau roman movement.

Robert Pinget was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1919. After completing his law studies at the Collège de Genève and working as a lawyer for a year, he moved to Paris in 1946 to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he studied painting under Jean Souverbie [fr].

In 1951, he published his first novel, Entre Fantoine et Agapa. After publishing two other novels, but then having his fourth rejected by Gallimard, Pinget was recommended by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett to Jérôme Lindon, head of Éditions de Minuit, where he published Graal Flibuste in 1956, and subsequently the rest of his work. He became a French citizen in 1960, and purchased a 16th-century house in Touraine where he spent the rest of his life.

Scholars and critics have often associated his work with that of his friend Samuel Beckett, whom he met in 1955.

He died of a stroke in Tours in 1997.

The Old Tune, Samuel Beckett's free translation of La Manivelle, was produced by Barbara Bray and broadcast on BBC Third Programme on 23 August 1960.

In 1962, Germaine Tailleferre of Les Six set eleven of Pinget's poems in a song cycle entitled "Pancarte pour Une Porte D'Entrée" (roughly translated as "Handbill for an Entrance") for medium voice and piano, commissioned by the American Soprano and Arts Patron Alice Swanson Esty.