French writer Robert Sabatier dies aged 88: publisher

Sabatier's first book of fiction, "Alain et le negre" (Alain and the Negro), was published in 1953 and was hailed as the first French anti-racist novel. It was later adapted for the cinema.
He published a dozen books of poetry and authored a nine-volume book on the history of French poetry, for which he claimed to have read 25 million poems over four decades.
French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti said that with his death, France had lost a "great literary figure".
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