The Académie des lettres du Québec handed over its literary prizes on Tuesday evening, saluting what in its eyes has been done best in 2021 in novel, poetry, essay and theater. The novelist Ying Chen was crowned, as well as Tania Langlais in poetry, Dalie Giroux for the essay and Olivier Choinière in theater.
Ying Chen is a regular writer whose work is solid and yet rarely acclaimed by awards – otherwise Ingratitude (Leméac), multi-award-winning book from 1995. Here is Radiation (Leméac) left with the laurels of the Ringuet Prize for the novel. The author is interested in “Marie Curie and her daughter Irene, also a scientist”, as Dominic Tardif wrote in our pages. “But as in Injuries, her previous novel following the trajectory of the doctor Norman Bethune, the writer judiciously keeps away from the tone of the historical novel to better delve into the interior life of her characters borrowed from great history. “
In poetry, it’s Tania Langlais, outing, with While Perceval was falling (Les Herbes Rouges), eleven years of silence in publishing, which was honored with the Alain-Granbois prize. Upon his release, the critic of the To have to Hugues Corriveau pointed out that ” grasp what unites this fall of Perceval and this suicide by drowning of Virginia [Woolf], this is the underlying work of the poet, circling death, seeking meaning. This very beautiful collection offers us, with great modesty, the faces of slow or brutal death, of disappearances. “
These are the painful questions asked in The eye of the master. Figures of the Quebec colonial imaginations (Inkwell memory) by Dalie Giroux that the jury for the Victor-Barbeau essay prize selected this year. “Why is it that in the Republican political imagination of the Quebec elite, the fact of allying with Indigenous peoples (and the feminist perspective, and anti-racism, and the queer, and multiculturalism), would it harm the emancipation of the Francos? »Asks the philosopher.
For the Marcel-Dubé Theater Prize, the jury also leaned towards philosophy, by electing Zoe (Workshop 10), by Olivier Choinière. A text that mainly returns questions, as Marie Labrecque noted in her review in our pages of the show. “To illustrate the different perspectives, Choinière often repeats, at the beginning of the scene, a dialogue by changing the tone or the conclusion, while modifying the disposition of the two characters. […] The show itself seems tense between the individual, the intimate and the collective. “
The prices of the Académie des lettres du Québec include a $ 1,500 scholarship, a work by Rober Racine and membership in the Center québécois du PEN international.