(Paris) Frenchwoman Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam won the Medici prize for the French novel on Tuesday with the thirteenth hour (POL editions), while the Ukrainian Andreï Kurkov obtained the Medici of the foreign novel.
Posted at 9:08
The winner, a 56-year-old French teacher, writes from the point of view of a teenager, Farah, and her family, invested in a church founded by the father, who finds herself around poetry readings.
” I am glad. I feel like I’m part of a line,” the winner told the press, citing former winners like Georges Perec, Mathieu Lindon and Marie Darrieussecq.
“It’s a novel of course, but also a tribute to poetry […] I can only repeat my pride in having this very fine prize, ”said the novelist.
The Medici Prize for Foreign Novel went to Andrei Kurkov for The gray bees (Liana Levi editions), a novel about the absurdity of the conflict triggered by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
The Medici Prize for Essay was awarded to Georges Didi-Huberman for The witness until the end (Minuit editions).
“This little book that was elected — thank you so much — is a little volume on a case that deserved it,” explained the philosopher.
He devotes this work to Victor Klemperer, “a great philologist who chose to stay in Dresden” under Nazism – where he was denied the right to teach because of his Jewish ancestry – to study the changes in the German language in a totalitarian regime.
A last great autumn literary prize remains to be awarded, the Interallié on Wednesday.