The historian, journalist and columnist at To have to Jean-François Nadeau received the Pierre-Vadeboncoeur prize on Wednesday for his collection of essays Bad weather (Lux editor, 2022). Awarded by the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN), this prize rewards “the essay that stood out the most during the year”. It comes with a $5,000 scholarship.
Mélikah Abdelmoumen, writer and editor-in-chief of the magazine Quebec letterswas also rewarded, for her essay Baldwin, Styron and me (Inkwell memory, 2022).
The former president of the CSN, Claudette Carbonneau, chaired the jury. She highlighted the “well-felt and beautifully written pamphleteer accents” of Bad weather.
Reflection on time
” [Jean-François] Nadeau strives to raise awareness on issues that are very much of our time, she added. The author engages in a reflection on time, on our relationship to it, on its role as an instrument of power over the ordinary world. It invites us to review a deeply alienating, unjust and unequal social contract based on productivity, consumerism and its many servitudes. »
The Pierre-Vadeboncoeur prize represents, according to Mr. Nadeau, “one of the very rare private prizes for essays in Quebec”.
He said he was “very touched”, especially since the award bears the name of Pierre Vadeboncoeur, “a great essayist” whom he knew personally.
Two very different books
Bad weather brings together, among other things, chronicles published in The duty, as well as other texts, with the common thread of the grip of capitalism on our relationship to time. “At the beginning of the book, I talk about the alarm clock, which has become something that seems so normal to us, but which is a very recent invention, or even the punch clocks factories,” says the author.
Mr. Nadeau therefore explores a wide variety of subjects, through several short texts that take a critical look at our society, where “we have never known so many inequalities,” he says.
The test Baldwin, Styron and meby Mélikah Abdelmoumen, explores the friendship between the African-American writer James Baldwin and William Styron, grandson of a slave owner.
“The jury found in this work an intimate experience of the world, which invites a necessary dialogue anchored in a confronting reality, which calls its reader to commitment, all of this resting on a joyful intellectual rigor which unfolds in a very original structure,” said Mr.me Carbonneau.
Among the laureates who have received the Pierre-Vadeboncoeur prize for 12 years, Aurélie Lanctôt and Normand Baillargeon are still collaborating with the Homework, and Josée Boileau was editorialist, information director and editor-in-chief of the newspaper from 2009 to 2016.