Haiti

Ignace Nau

1808–1845

Born in Port-au-Prince in 1808, Nau was a poet, story writer and historian, and a founder of the 1836 Cénacle, the circle that launched Haitian Romanticism and sought a literature built on Haiti’s own history, landscape and identity. His poems, including Le Livre de Marie, written after his wife’s death in 1837, turn love, grief, faith and the memory of the Revolution inward. He is also credited with some of the earliest Haitian short stories, and died in 1845.