Mistral, Frédéric

Mistral, Frédéric (1830-1914), French Provençal poet and Nobel laureate, born near Maillane, Bouches-du-Rhône Department. In 1854 Mistral and other writers founded the Félibrige, a society to revive the use of the Provençal language. His pastoral poem Mirèio (1859; trans. 1868), written in his native Provençal dialect, gained for him the poet's prize of the Académie Française. He also wrote and compiled a Provençal-French dictionary (1878-1886) and wrote several volumes of poetry, including Lis isclo d'or (The Golden Isles, 1876) and the dramatic poem La Reino Jano (Queen Joan, 1890). He shared the 1904 Nobel Prize with the Spanish writer José Echegaray y Eizaguirre.