Quebecer Kevin Lambert won the December prize on Tuesday, becoming at 31 the youngest winner to win this coveted award in France for its strong endowment.
The novelist is rewarded for May our joy remain (Editions du Nouvel Attila), a fiction about the fall of an architect accused of chasing the poor out of Montreal.
The prize was created in 1989 (under the name of Novembre prize) to reward a novel forgotten by the other autumn literary prizes. But, this year, it comes before the other major prizes, such as the Femina, the Goncourt, the Renaudot and the Médicis.
It is endowed with 15,000 euros, with the support of the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation.
With his novel, a scathing critique of the good conscience of those in power, published in Canada in September 2022, Kevin Lambert has aroused critical enthusiasm in France.
The Obs praised “a brilliant and cruel fresco” and The world the “skill” of an ambitious writer thanks to which “the reader is dizzying”.
In September, however, its publisher fueled the controversy by revealing that the author had used the services of a Canadian-Haitian proofreader to verify the extent to which a character of Haitian origin was credible.
If the intervention of a “sensitivity reader” is common in North America, it is much less so in France. A former winner of the Goncourt Prize, Nicolas Mathieu, said he refused to “make professionals of sensitivities, experts in stereotypes, specialists in what is accepted and dared at a given moment the compass of our work” .
Kevin Lambert said little on the subject. His editor reported his comments according to which this proofreader, Chloé Savoie-Bernard, “made sure that I did not say too much nonsense, that I did not fall into certain traps of the representation of black people”.