The Grand Prix du livre de Montréal was awarded Thursday evening to Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, at the Maison de la culture in Verdun, for his collection of poetic texts The Good Arabsthe second English language title to win the award since its inception in 1965.
Posted at 7:30 p.m.
“It’s frankly a surprise; I thought I wouldn’t win because there really wasn’t a precedent,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch told us in an interview.
“What is even more surprising is that as a trans person, Arab and writing in English, it is a very different choice from previous years. Nicholas Dawson had won the award last year and he is a person queer and racialized, but there was this extra element since the book was written in English. »
Nicholas Dawson won over the jury last year with his essay Now my homepublished by Triptyque editions.
The only time the prize had been awarded to a book written in English was in 2004, for Franklin’s Passageby David Solway.
Between Parc-Ex and Lebanon
Published last year by the Anglo-Montreal publisher Metonymy Press, The Good Arabs is Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s second title after knotbodypublished in 2020. The collection of prose poems explores questions of identity – sexual orientation, belonging – between the streets of his neighborhood of Parc-Extension and his country of origin, Lebanon.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE EDITOR
The Good Arabs
Written mainly in Montreal – although the author’s travels to Lebanon, especially during the waste crisis that shook the country in 2015, were largely involved in the writing – the book is peppered with a few words of French, but mostly Arabic.
There are words – and I believe this is true for all languages – that cannot be translated with the same feeling they have in their original language.
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch
“A reader who speaks Arabic will understand them, but I believe that one who does not speak it will still grasp the meaning of the words by their texture. Words like khallas, I use them every day – I wouldn’t say “stop”, even to people I don’t speak to in Arabic. So I was just imitating [cette habitude] », specifies Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, who has just finished the English translation of The daughter of herselfby Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay (to be published in the spring by Vehicule Press), and who is working on an anthology for Metonymy Press on Arab works queer and trans.
The other four books that were in the running for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal 2022 are A thousand secrets, a thousand dangersby Alain Farah, the essay Seven proses on poetry, by Daniel Canty, as well as the novels Morell, by Maxime Raymond Bock, and When We Lost our Head, by Heather O’Neill (whose translation by Dominique Fortier, Losing the mindjust published by Alto).
Finalists win a $1,000 bursary from the City, while the winner receives $15,000.
The jury was made up of Marie-Célie Agnant, Arianne Des Rochers, Ayavi Lake, Émilie Monnet and Billy Robinson, chaired by Carole David.