Homage to Yves Navarre (GE 1964), a writer awarded by l'Académie Française

Yves Navarre was born in 1940  and was graduate in 1964 from EDHEC.

In the first of two volumes of his own semi-fictionalised Biographie (1981), Navarre states: 'I never decided to be a writer, I was writing even before I knew how to write. Writing begins at the first glance exchanged with another.' But he did start writing at a very early age, while still a student at the Lycee Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and later at the EDHEC.
Navarre kept his hand in as a writer at 'that other school of composition', copywriting, and for many years worked as editor and creative writer in publicity companies. Yet it was not until 1971 that he was finally able to publish what he described as his 'umpteenth novel', Lady Black. It had a moderate succes d'estime and was followed almost every year by a new novel.
Evolene (1972) was more highly praised, and led to his first big success, Les Loukoums (1973), which was later translated into English. It is still a best-seller in the paperback edition, with its charming drawing of the author by David Hockney (1975), showing a great perceptive sympathy for a character both wary and defiant, tender and - as befits a true Gascon - choleric.

Les Loukoums, like most of Navarre's other novels, is partly autobiographical. They nearly all contain explicit references to his homosexuality, or to characters who struggle to comes to terms with the gay way of life by creating what might be described as 'homosociality' in their relationships with others.

Navarre won the Prix Goncourt in 1980 for Le Jardin d'Acclimatation which is not really one of his best works. Then he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres - a distinction he would refer to with amused indifference. He also enjoyed some success as a playwright, and his collected plays are published in three volumes (1973, 1976, 1979). 

After three years in exile in Montreal, Navarre returned to Paris in 1992, to a small apartment in the Marais, where he lived alone, without even a favourite cat. The Academie Francaise awarded him a sort of consolation prize 'in support of further literary creation and as a reward for his work as a whole', and he made the embittered comment, in the words of Vicky, a character in his play Les Dernieres clientes (1977), set in a sauna: 'All despair is not yet lost'. He was seen occasionally at rendezvous like Le Duplex, Domboulette and Le Coffee Shop before the crush started, at the gay bookshop Les Mots a la Bouche and at the celebrated bar Piano Zinc where he would sip a double decaffeinated coffee before retiring to his solitary couch.
'I rarely go anywhere else. I no longer travel,' he said in an interview in the magazine Gai Pied Hebdo. 'I should like to take my leave of life in a clean and decent manner.' Police reported that Navarre took his own life at his apartment in Paris on Monday.