(Paris) The writer Christine Angot was elected on Tuesday as a member of the Académie Goncourt, which awards the most prestigious prize for French literature each year, the Academy announced on Twitter.
Prix Médicis in 2021 for his novel The Journey to the Eastwhich deals with pain related to incest, the subject of several of her novels, Christine Angot, 64, will succeed Patrick Rambaud, 76, and sit at the next meeting of the Académie Goncourt on April 4.
Born in 1959, she was raised by her mother, after the failure of her parents’ couple, as she tells in An impossible love (2015), brought to the screen by Catherine Corsini, with Virginie Efira.
The key to understanding Christine Angot, a sometimes eruptive personality, adored or hated for her media interventions, is an event recounted several times in her novels: when she is 13, her father reappears, a man who had been absent from her life until then, who decides late to bequeath his name to him.
This polyglot intellectual turns out to be a rapist who abuses her, still a teenager, and keeps her under his control until she is 26 years old.
As she says in The Journey to the Eastseen as his most luminous book, the contrast is striking between the impunity enjoyed by this man, who shone as an international civil servant, father of a family, notable in Strasbourg, and the wounds of his daughter, flayed alive.
This is the whole origin of his desire to write, a form of revenge and sublimation.
For his part, Patrick Rambaud, Prix Goncourt for The battle (Grasset) in 1997 who gave up his seat “because of his state of health”, became an honorary member (who no longer exercises the function but keeps the title, editor’s note) of the Académie Goncourt.
Chaired by Didier Decoin since January 2020, the Académie Goncourt has ten jurors, including four women. In addition to Christine Angot, there are writers Camille Laurens, Paule Constant and Françoise Chandernagor.
The race for the Goncourt prize, awarded at the beginning of November, starts at the end of spring, with the presentation to the jurors of the contending novels by the publishers.
The jury was exceptionally divided in November 2022 when the Goncourt was awarded to Brigitte Giraud. His book live fast was supported by one camp, while the other preferred The Mage of the Kremlinby Italian-Swiss Giuliano da Empoli.