Nicolas Kurtovitch published his first collection of poetry, Sloboda, in 1973. He was 18 years old. He self-published because the urgency of expressing himself was undeniable to him. This urgency would continue to drive him, leading him to become one of the most prolific authors of his generation.

Born on December 20, 1955 in Nouméa, he is the youngest of the siblings. His maternal family has been established in New Caledonia since 1843. It includes among its members one of the first Frenchmen to have set foot on what was still, in the eyes of the West, only a "terra incognita": Jean Taragnat.

His father was a Yugoslavian migrant who left Sarajevo in 1945 and soon returned to Europe.

While childhood is a period little explored, at least explicitly, in the work of Nicolas Kurtovitch, the desire to inhabit the present, obstinately, and to think about the world around him is, on the other hand, a constant.

As a poet, over the years he also tried his hand at all other genres: short stories, essays, plays and novels, including Good Night Friend, then Les Heures Italiques followed by Dans le Ciel Splendide.

This is because Nicolas Kurtovitch testifies above all to a deep, vital refusal of everything that, more or less, confines, reduces, and even defines, in the sense that definition aims to fix, stop, limit.

Very early on, after completing his schooling in New Caledonia, he left his island. He went to the distant metropolis for his studies, of course, but also, and before that, to New Zealand and Australia for a journey. Diverse horizons for a man who walks. A surveyor, who quite logically embarked on studies in geography. A graduate of the University of Aix-en-Provence, he taught this subject in a secondary school in Lifou, one of the islands of the New Caledonian archipelago. Today, after many years (25) as headmaster of the Protestant high school Do Kamo, which remains one of the most effective vehicles for promoting young Kanak people, he is responsible for cultural and youth programs in the Southern Province and then in the Government of New Caledonia. He retired at the end of 2015.

Because Nicolas Kurtovitch is also one of the first Caledonian voices of European origin to have explicitly questioned the nature of the relationship between the communities present on his native land. And to have unambiguously posited the recognition of the indigenous people as a condition for living together.

In the collective essay "Being a Caledonian today" he writes: "Yes, if you will, to the affirmation of a Caledonian identity, but on the condition of not forgetting that the free man remains indefinable, nor the undeniable fact that this is Kanak land."

This conviction permeates his work as a writer. It has even been translated into concrete action on two occasions through collaborative writing with Kanak authors: *Dire le vrai/Tell the truth*, a collection of poems, with Déwé Gorodé. Together, they inscribe in the literary history of New Caledonia a dialogue between voices that, while affirming their diversity, simultaneously demonstrate the possibility of a shared expression.

Playwriting came later in his career, notably with *Le Sentier Kaawenya*. Then came the adventure of *Les dieux sont borgnes*, a play he co-wrote with the Kanak playwright Pierre Gope. It was performed in Avignon in 2003, directed by Yves Borrini and Nicole Kurtovitch of the company Le Bruit des hommes. In 2004, Nicolas Kurtovitch published a play entitled *La Commande*, which was performed at the Tjibaou Cultural Center in 2006 by the Kalachakra troupe, directed by Marise Courbet.

In 2007, he succeeded Charles Juliet and several others at Randell Cottage, a writers' residency in Wellington, New Zealand. During this time, he was the guest poet of the renowned New Zealand poetry journal, Poetry NZ. His work has also been published in numerous other journals, including Archipel des lettres, the journal of the Ouessant Island Book Fair; Carnavalesques, a contemporary poetry journal published by Aspect in Nancy; Voix d'encre; and others.

In 2008, he was invited as the winner of the Antonio Viccario Poetry Prize to the Trois-Rivières Poetry Festival (Quebec), and in 2009 to the poetry festivals in Mexico City and Morilla. In 2014, he was invited to the Sarajevo Poetry Festival, a very significant event for him. In 2017, he was invited for a two-month residency in Shanghai by the Shanghai Writers' Association. In 2019, invited for a four-month residency by the CALI association, he was in residence at the Créac'h Semaphore on the island of Ouessant. He has been a frequent guest at the Papeete Book Fair, Lire en Polynésie (Reading in Polynesia), and the Pirogue Book Fair in Vanuatu. Through these important encounters, he has forged strong friendships with poets from around the world, continually breaking down the barriers between people.

His entire body of work bears witness to this: Nicolas Kurtovitch is a man of movement and places—places that resonate with the words of men, but also, perhaps above all, with their silences, shared or not, and with the questions that the presence of the other raises for each of us. His work is also a discourse "of solitude and exile," to borrow the title of one of his poems published in *The Weapon That Will Make Me Conquer*.

In a language striving to shed the trappings of appearances, his writing is therefore at once an act of existence and resistance, traversed by the intertwined themes of rootedness and exile: a rootedness lived, an exile fully accepted.

Although he has practiced aikido for many years and is an avid reader of Japanese poets, it is with the conviction that art is of the order of gesture, launched by a man who walks and strives to be there, simply, standing in the awareness of his walk, his solitude and his exile, but also of his total freedom.

A member of the New Caledonia Writers' Association, having served as its first president, and of the Society of Men of Letters, Nicolas Kurtovitch, a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters since 2004, received the Poetry Prize at the Ouessant Island Book Fair in 2003 for *Le piéton du dharma*. He also received the Vi Nimö Prize from high school students in New Caledonia in 2011 for his collection *Les arbres et les rochers se partager la montagne* (published by Vent d'ailleurs), and the Popaï Prize for Caledonian Literature in 2011 for his novel *Les heures italiques* (published by Au vent des îles, Tahiti, Papeete).

Today, his work is read and studied in universities throughout the region. He is also the driving force behind the creation of the Geopoetics Centre of New Caledonia, in connection with the Institute of Geopoetics initiated by Kenneth White.

Nicolas Kurtovitch