Prix Goncourt: Eric Vuillard

Eric Vuillard won the Prix Goncourt for best work of French literature 2017.  Vuillard's book "L'Ordre du jour" looks at the hidden steps that gave rise to the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938. 

The Prix Goncourt was awarded last week by the 10 members of the Academy Goncourt in Paris to Eric Vuillard for having written the best French-language prose work of the preceding year. While Vuillard takes home a token prize of just €10 (around $12), his book L'Ordre du jour (The Order of the Day) receives the highly coveted Goncourt jacket-band, which leads to explosive book sales and household name fame.

In L'Ordre du jour, Eric Vuillard uses fiction to retrace the behind-the-scenes steps leading to Nazi Germany's invasion of Austria in 1938.  With respect to the relationship between history and fiction, Vuillard has said that, "Literature is intended to tell the stories that are important and even threatening ... There are forms of discovery that are specific to reading and writing. What I call fiction is the editing made by the data collected."

Also announced last week was the Prix Renaudot, which is seen as a second-place award that, while not related to the Prix Goncourt, complements it. Author Olivier Guez received the honor for his work, "La disparition de Joseph Menguele" (The Disappearance of Joseph Menguele).

Prix Goncourt

Leïla Slimani, a French-Moroccan novelist, was awarded France's top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, on Thursday for her book Chanson Douce (Sweet Song), a thriller that opens with the killing of two young children by their caretaker. The novel, which draws on elements from the real story of a nanny from the Dominican Republic who has been accused of killing two children under her care in New York in 2012, pieces together disparate events that culminate in a nightmarish outcome.

From the NYT:

Several commentators had predicted that Ms. Slimani would win. The novel has been a best seller — more than 76,000 copies have been purchased — and Ms. Slimani, 35, has a high profile as a former journalist at Jeune Afrique, a French-language magazine of African news. 

“She’s a young woman, talented, so we’re completely in the spirit of the Goncourt prize,” Bernard Pivot, the head of the Goncourt Academy, said at a Facebook Live chat organized by the newspaper Le Figaro on Thursday. 

Ms. Slimani, who left Morocco for France at 17 and enrolled at Sciences Po in Paris, one of the country’s most prestigious universities, made her entrance onto the literary scene in 2014 with the critically acclaimed novel “Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre” (“In the Ogre’s Garden”), a look at the life of a sex-addicted woman in some of the most chic neighborhoods of Paris.

Read more here.

Prix Goncourt: Pierre Lemaitre

France's most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt, has been awarded to Pierre Lemaitre for his World War I epic Au revoir là-haut (Goodbye Up There). The Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year"

It was the first Goncourt win for longtime crime writer Lemaitre and his first non-genre work after a series of successful thrillers. He is best known among English-language readers for the translation of his thriller Alex, which took the 2013 CWA International Dagger award.

"I'm the happiest man on earth. This is a unique moment in a writer's career," Lemaitre said after the win. He said the award was recognition of "the skill that comes from crime writing, from popular fiction".

In French:



Au revoir là-haut de Pierre Lemaître from webtvculture on Vimeo.