The young thirty-year-old author Kevin Lambert has joined the greats of French-speaking literature. He is our Personality of the Year 2023, “Culture” category.
Kevin Lambert has carved out a place for himself among the greats of French-speaking literature this year. His third novel, May our joy remain, was rewarded in France with the prestigious Médicis prize, as well as the Décembre prize. Beyond the honors, his sustained participation in public debate has made the 31-year-old author the new literary media figure in Quebec.
Noticed from the publication of his first novel, You’ll love what you killed (Héliotrope), in 2017, the Jeannoise writer has built since his beginnings a work which questions social relationships and dissects violence and injustice without ever losing sight of its genesis and functioning.
May our joy remain, published in 2022 by Héliotrope, evokes the decline of a world-renowned Montreal architect, singled out for her contribution to gentrification and the housing crisis. With its ample phrasing which alternates voices in a captivating rhythm, the novel is also a tribute to Marie-Claire Blais, the first Quebecer to win the Médicis prize in 1966.
By choosing to adopt the point of view of the dominant class, Kevin Lambert dissects the internal story that the privileged tell themselves to justify their state, as well as the contradictions it underlies. By skillfully avoiding the trap of Manichaeism, the author offers a reflection dense enough to allow all sides to recognize each other and project their own interpretation of events.
Controversies
Ironically, this sense of nuance led the writer to a first media controversy last summer, when the Prime Minister of Quebec François Legault made a positive review of the book on his Facebook page, summarizing everything in these words: “An internationally renowned architect is accused of neighborhood gentrification. Nuanced criticism of the Quebec bourgeoisie. Pressure groups and journalists are looking for scapegoats for the housing crisis in Montreal. »
Shocked by this one-sided interpretation of his novel, Kevin Lambert replied: “Reading, if you don’t get anything out of what you read, isn’t of much use. […] No need to “look for scapegoats for the housing crisis” […] You are not scapegoats, you are people in positions of power who could do something and who do nothing. There’s a word for that: responsible. »
This skirmish quickly made it possible to direct the gaze of the Quebec public towards the writer. By choosing to position himself politically and defend his vision of literature, the latter affirmed his media relevance, fitting into the legacy of Victor-Lévy Beaulieu and Dany Laferrière, among others.
A few months later, having barely landed across the Atlantic to accompany his book selected on the first Goncourt list, Kevin Lambert found himself at the heart of a new controversy when his publisher revealed that he had retained the services of a sensitive Canadian-Haitian reader to validate the credibility of a character.
Kevin Lambert had to make numerous media appearances to justify his use of this practice, associated by many in France with an exercise in censorship. On all platforms, he defended his point of view with an intelligence and a panache which have, at the very least, in no way diminished the value of his work in the eyes of the grand literary juries.
With the Medici and December prizes – of which he is the youngest winner in history – in his pocket, the 31-year-old writer has all eyes on him. This week, the magazine Release rightly called him “one of the literary sensations of the year”. If he does not hesitate to enter the game, it is to talk about literature, and literature only, untying for the general public the strings of the creative process, analysis and literary filiation, and reiterating the relevance of the writer’s words and thoughts.
“What Kevin Lambert is saying, in his media style, is that you can be an intellectual, know what you do, want to do it, define it well, define it in depth, without losing as much media attention and relevance as we want to have,” said Duty in November the professor of literature at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières David Bélanger, who has been interested for years in the figure of the media writer.
2023 is much more than the year of consecration for Kevin Lambert. In the public eye, he now embodies the renewal of Quebec literature, carried by a generation which is not afraid to shake up conventions, to propose new paradigms of thought, without ever losing sight of the work of the greats who preceded her.
The finalists: the couple Sophie Lorain and Alexis Durand-Brault as well as Stéphan Bureau