Gisèle Prassinos

Gisèle Prassinos (Istanbul, 1920 – Paris, 2015) was a French writer of Greek origin associated with the surrealist movement. Her case is unusual: she began publishing as a teenager and gradually moved away from the group's orthodoxy to develop a personal body of work that is hard to classify.

Her family left Constantinople and settled in Nanterre when she was a child. At fourteen she began writing automatic texts, which she presented to the surrealists through Henri Parisot. André Breton and Paul Éluard were struck by her poetry, and Man Ray photographed her reading her poems at the Café Dynamo. Her first book, La Sauterelle arthritique, appeared in 1935 with a preface by Éluard.

During the war, and until the late 1950s, she stopped publishing. She worked in kindergartens and, together with her husband Pierre Fridas, translated several books by Níkos Kazantzákis. She then returned to poems and novels, such as Le temps n'est rien, an autofiction about the conflict between past and present. Later she focused mainly on fantasy novels, and she also made drawings and tapestries from pieces of coloured cloth.

Her legacy includes a large body of manuscripts deposited at the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris.