Schooling with Payerne, Lausanne and Freiburg. Studies of letters in Lausanne. French Master to the gymnasium of the City of Lausanne. Founder of the reviews Country of the Lake in 1953, Writing in 1964 and of the Nicole price of literature in 1967.

Its first works are collections of poems (the close Day, 1954), which will alternate as of the Sixties with accounts (Remainder with us, 1967) and of the novels, of which the Ogre (1973), first Goncourt price decreed with a nonFrench author.

Since 1964, Chessex holds a chronicle of the novel in the New French Review; beside its studies on French authors, joined together in the Holy Scriptures (1972), it devotes tests to Charles-Albert Cingria (1967), Maupassant (1981) and Flaubert (1991). Its Portrait of Of Vaud (1969), ironic, epic and tender, ensures a great popularity to him, in German-speaking Switzerland too.

Bibliography

J. Garcin, Discussions with Jacques Chessex, 1979

J. Garcin, G. Salem, Jacques Chessex, 1985

Jacques Chessex, the route, cat. exhibition. Lausanne, 1994