The novelist Ann Scott won the French Renaudot literary prize on Tuesday, at the age of 58, for her novel. The Insolentretracing the story of a forty-year-old woman who leaves Paris, published by Calman-Lévy.
The Insolent tells the story of the arrival “in the middle of nowhere” of Alex, a film music composer who decides to leave the capital to reinvent herself, wishing to live “elsewhere and alone”.
The character is a fictional double of the author, who left Paris for Brittany, where she now lives.
Born to a Russian photographer mother and a French art collector father, Ann Scott grew up in Paris before moving to London at 17.
She was a model, a drummer in a punk band and frequented the underground Parisian night scene a lot. She started writing at the age of 29, notably writing the novel AsphyxiaThen Super star.
She was not a favorite for the Renaudot, a prize for which Gaspard Koenig was also in the running (Humus at L’Observatoire), Lilia Hassaine, (Panorama at Gallimard) and Sorj Chalandon (The Enraged at Grasset).
The essay prize was awarded to Jean-Luc Barré for the first volume, in more than 900 pages, of an immense biography: De Gaulle, a life: nobody’s man (1890-1944), published by Grasset. This sum was published on October 18 and entered directly into the list of finalists for the Renaudot essay.
The Renaudot Pocket Book Prize went to Manuel Carcassonne for The Turnaround.