About

Welcome to the About page! If you clicked here, you're looking to find out a little more about Loëly — or about who's behind it.

So, the team… for now, it's mostly me. My name is Benoît Magne.

I don't come from publishing or tech at all. For a long time I worked in film as a location manager, then I started a company collecting and recycling waste from film shoots! And dealing with the collection, recycling and reuse of waste for the film industry is about as far from a poetry moment as you can get. So after running that company for five years, I sold it at the end of 2024.

Between the film shoots and starting that company, there was a little literary detour — or rather a bookshop one. I worked in several Parisian bookshops — notably the Terrasse de Gutenberg and l'Arbre à Lettres. That's where I truly discovered poetry: not the kind learned by heart at school, but something far more alive. Darwish, Yeats, Tsvetaeva, Rose Ausländer, Valérie Rouzeau, Pierre Reverdy, Kae Tempest, Whitman, Brautigan, even The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini… there was clearly something more out there than the French 19th-century triumvirate.

Then, while I was handling waste on all those film shoots, I turned more and more toward poetry (probably a need to escape!) — and toward writing it. I kept at it, despite the exhaustion. And in July 2023, the idea took shape: what if there were an app bringing together classic, contemporary and user-written poetry, with a reading experience as smooth as social media?

Loëly is exactly that. Not everything is out yet, but it's already well on its way — and I hope you'll find something here that speaks to you.