The ladies of Femina will open the ball of the pretenders to literary fame on Monday, followed the next day by the jury of the Medici, before the awarding of the Goncourt and the Renaudot Wednesday.
Four contenders are in the running for the Goncourt, the most coveted literary awards in the French speaking world: David Diop, 52 years of age, to soul Brother (Threshold), Paul Greveillac, 37 years of age, to Masters and slaves (Gallimard), Nicolas Mathieu, 40 years old, for Their children after them (Acts South) and Thomas B. Reverdy, 44, for The winter of mécontentemen t (Flammarion).
David Diop, a favorite of journalists
a successor to Eric Vuillard, winner of the Goncourt prize last year? As every year, the professional magazine Livres Hebdo interviewed seventeen journalists literary to collect their prognosis.
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If the intuitions of these journalists are correct, David Diop, the only author to be included in nearly all the selections (it was also shortlisted for the Femina, Médicis and Renaudot) should décrocher la timbale. A majority of journalists (nine of seventeen) of the saw get the price.
as we commemorate the centenary of the end of the Great War, soul Brother takes us back to the hell of the trenches. The story is told by a skirmisher senegalese who is sinking into madness after the death of one of his companions-in-arms.
Paul Greveillac has got three votes, Nicolas Mathieu, and Thomas B. Reverdy a voice, while three critics refused to say.
Philippe Lançon
Livres Hebdo doesn’t just apply to professional journalists who, according to them, will be the Goncourt, but also who would have deserved to have it. To this question, the name of Philippe Lançon comes up the most often. But flap (Gallimard), the book of the survivor of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, was not selected by the jury of the Goncourt.
“This novel is not a work of imagination, it is a testament (…) it is a very good book, perhaps one of the most beautiful of the year, but it does not correspond to what is expected by the Goncourt, that is to say, to crown a novel of the imagination”, is justified Bernard Pivot, president of the Goncourt.
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For many, this decision is a mistake. Not to have used Lance is “a dumpling Goncourt grand cru worthy of the Wolves of Guy Mazeline, the earlier (1932) on Journey to the end of the night Celine,” said Baptiste Liger, the editorial director of Read .
Winner of September’s prize Novel News, Philippe Lançon has indirectly responded to Bernard Pivot, explaining that his work was “a work of imagination as any act of creation.” “I have not imagined what I experienced from January 7 to November 13, 2015. I haven’t imagined anything of what I said. But I imagined how to write and deal with,” he pointed out in accepting his award.
The jury of Femina and Renaudot have been the opposite of the Goncourt, retaining Philippe Lançon among their finalists.
First novel
The Goncourt and the Renaudot will be announced on Wednesday, shortly before 13 o’clock, at the restaurant Drouant, not far from the Opera of Paris. Didier Decoin, the secretary general of the académie Goncourt, will be speaking first, followed by Louis Gardel, who chairs this year’s jury Renaudot. The Femina will be proclaimed on Monday in a lounge at the Cercle de l’union interallié, at two steps from the Elysée palace, while the Medici will communicate its choice to the restaurant, The Mediterranean, the place of the Odeon.
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A Goncourt flows average more than 400,000 copies, the Renaudot to more than 250,000, the Femina to 60,000 copies, and the Medici up to 45,000. While the start of the literary autumn was marked by a profusion of first novels (94 in total, a level not seen since 2007), only one is in the running for a literary prize. It is the Medici, who has made this bold choice by holding It tells Sarah (Midnight), Pauline Delabroy-Allard.
