Colette Mart was born in Luxembourg in 1955. She grew up in Esch-Alzette, in the industrial South of Luxembourg, a region that often features as the social background to her literary work.
She studied journalism and public relations at the Free University in Brussels, followed by a specialization in European Studies. For 30 years, she has been working as a journalist, first in Brussels, later in Heidelberg and since 1984 in Luxembourg.
Her journalistic work focuses on women issues, war traumatism in Luxembourg families related to Word War II, national and local politics, as well as on local Luxembourg culture and literature.
As an editorialist for the daily newspaper “Lëtzebuerger Journal”, she comments on political and social events and analyses social developments, often from a psychological point of view. She also focuses on human relations and on psychology, for example, in her articles written for the women’s magazine “Carriere”.
Colette Mart is the daughter of a politician. Her father was a member of the Luxembourg parliament and the European parliament. Therefore, she has always been interested in politics. After the death of her father, she herself became politically active. Since 1999, she has been a member of the City council of the capital of Luxembourg. In this function, she has become committed to the issues of socially disadvantaged children, equal chances for all children at school, economic issues of concern to the city of Luxembourg and local culture.
Since 2004, Colette Mart is the president of the Luxembourg Writers’ association. She has published five books with short stories, poems and articles on human relations. In her literary work, she examines the lives of women in her own family in the context of their social backgrounds, like for instance her grandmothers. She thus describes the lives of women in Luxembourg during the twentieth century. She also looks at women’s problems and destinies. For example, she has written about breast cancer in every day life or miscarriage, which often remain taboos in literature.
Colette Mart has been married since 1978 and has three children, who are now 29, 25 and 17 years old.