French poet and essayist Yves Bonnefoy, 84, was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize on Tuesday in Prague.

The award of $10,000 US and a small reproduction of Prague's Franz Kafka monument has been awarded annually since 2001 to international authors who produce "works of exceptional artistic qualities."

French poet Yves Bonnefoy, shown in 1987, was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, in Prague on Tuesday.
(Pierre Gleizes/Associated Press)

Bonnefoy is one of the most influential French poets of the second half of the 20th century for works that use simple imagery to express complex spiritual ideas.

Some of his major poetry collections, including On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, Words in Stone and The Curved Planks, have been translated into Czech.

A student of mathematics and philosophy, Bonnefoy's writing is influenced by both disciplines.

He was also influenced by the post-Second World War French surrealists, although he later broke away from the movement, and in 1967, he helped found L'éphemère, a journal of art and literature.

He has also written his "spiritual autobiography," Arrière-pays, and produced several works of art history, including studies of Miró and Giacometti.

He has taught literature at universities in Paris and Nice and at Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins and New Haven universities in the U.S.

He is also a pre-eminent French translator of Shakespeare.

Bonnefoy was chosen for the Kafka Prize by an international jury that included German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and British publisher John Calder.

Past winners include Philip Roth, Nobelists Elfriede Jelinek and Harold Pinter and Haruki Murakami.

With files from the Associated Press