Literature will not have its mouth full today.
The health crisis has upset the literary price menu.
Like their neighbors from the Académie Goncourt, the jurors of Renaudot had to adapt and give up meeting at the Drouant restaurant.
This Monday, November 30, they met by videoconference.
After the announcement of the winner of the Goncourt prize, given this year to Hervé Le Tellier for L'Anomalie (ed. Gallimard), its president Didier Decoin called Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, president of Renaudot, to join their Zoom meeting.
Read also:
Story of the son
, by Marie-Hélène Lafon: return to the Kingdom
At 12:50, the author announced the lucky winner, or rather we should write, the lucky winner of the Renaudot Prize;
it is Marie-Hélène Lafon.
With
Histoire du Fils
(ed. Buchet-Chastel),
she succeeds
Sylvain Tesson and his novel
La Panthère des neiges
(ed. Gallimard).
She won the prize by absolute majority in the first ballot.
She faced Hervé Le Tellier, Étienne de Montety, Anthony Palou, Jean-Paul Enthoven and Irène Frain.
In the essay category, the Québécoise Dominique Fortier won the prize with Les Villes de papier (ed. Grasset).
To read also: Marie-Hélène Lafon: "Having roots, me that helps me to live"
Marie-Hélène Lafon is the fourteenth woman to win the Renaudot Prize.
In ten years, the Renaudot Prize jury has crowned five men and five women.
In comparison, the Goncourt and the Femina, since 2010, have only rewarded two women.
In the October 2 issue of
Figaro Littéraire
, journalist Astrid de Larminat underlined the author's great literary qualities.
“Marie-Hélène Lafon does not probe her characters, she respects their mystery.
She sculpts them like figures in bas-reliefs or like these rustic, archaic, immutable, unfathomable, reassuring Auvergne virgins.
She invented the novel in the Romanesque style. ”