French writer Christine Angot won the Medici Prize on Tuesday for The trip to the east (Flammarion), a powerful story of the incest she suffered. Kevin Lambert, Quebec author from Chicoutimi, was also in contention – for a second consecutive year, but for the first time this year in the final selection.
He found himself there, detours and deadlines of the international edition, with his first book You will like what you killed, published here by Héliotrope in 2017, and taken up for France by the Nouvel Attila.
It is this same publisher who paved the French market to M. Lambert last year by taking up and slightly reworking his Roberval’s Quarrel (Héliotrope, 2018), which has become for France Quarrel.
Meeting in a restaurant in the Odéon district in Paris, the Medici jury finally crowned the novelist Christine Angot, 62, for one of the most noticed books of the literary season 2021. Very moved in front of the jury, she thanked him saying: “This is very important”. Asked by the press, she said she was happy for those around her.
“It really matters […] That is to say that there are people who are there, who help you, who support you, who show that they are with you, ”she explained. Christine Angot was also selected Tuesday among the four finalists for the Goncourt Prize, which will be awarded on November 3.
Other laureates
The Medici Prize for Foreign Novels was awarded to Swedish-Tunisian Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The paternal clause (Actes Sud).
“It was a surprise. It is a huge honor to have this award. Not only for the price, but it is also for the book the possibility of finding new readers ”, explained this novelist, of Tunisian father and Swedish mother, who writes in Swedish and speaks French fluently.
The paternal clause tells of the struggles of a Swedish thirty-something of foreign origin who will question the authority of his immigrant father.
In this selection, was also found Missed opportunities, by the German Lucy Fricke, published in French by Le Quartanier, in a translation by Isabelle Liber.
The prize for the essay was awarded to the Frenchwoman Jakuta Alikavazovic for Like a sky in us (Stock). This book, in a collection that tells the story of writers’ nights at the museum, in this case that of the Louvre, is an exploration of the personal history of the author, the daughter of exiles who arrived in Paris from Yugoslavia.
“It’s a book about a night, it’s also a book about a life. Perhaps two: that of my father, who arrived in France in the early 1970s, and mine, who was born in Paris at the end of the 1970s. And on the means he found, and the Louvre part of it, to transmit something to me, which was not easy since he left his country, his family, his language, that we had to find common ground. This land is art, ”she told AFP.