Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam won the Landerneau readers' prize on Wednesday for
La Thirteenth Hour
, a novel about an intersex teenager who grows up in a sect.
She succeeds Clara Dupond-Monod, who won an award for
Adapt,
a novel about the birth of a disabled child told by his siblings.
In
La Thirteenth Hour
, published in August by POL, Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, a 56-year-old French teacher who also writes under the pseudonym Rebecca Lighieri, recounts Farah's life.
Born without completely corresponding to male and female biology, she is raised in a sect where poetry is recited.
Questions of identity, gender and freedom dominate this story tinged with melancholy and politics, with characters who isolate themselves far from the violence of the world.
"
It was my father who created the Church of the Thirteenth Hour, and if it has fewer followers than the Seventh Day, it is an injustice that time will repair - for I want to say that our religion is much freer, much more inventive and above all much more poetic than that of the Adventists
”, begins by recounting the heroine.
The jury of 220 readers is chaired by the boss of the large distribution Michel-Edouard Leclerc and the writer and journalist Éric Fottorino.
The Landerneau prize for E. Leclerc readers is endowed with 10,000 euros and offers its winner an advertising campaign in the press and in the brand's stores.
