Christine Angot becomes one of the four women jurors of the Académie Goncourt. She succeeds Patrick Rambaud, who gives up his seat “due to his state of health”.
The author 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 itself announced this new recruit through a press release posted on Twitter.
Prix Médicis in 2021 for his novel The Journey to the Eastshe will succeed the writer Patrick Rambaud, 76, and sit at the next meeting of the Académie Goncourt on April 4.
A sometimes eruptive personality, adored or hated for her media interventions, Christine Angot, 64, expresses the essence of her truth in her work, which she comments on little but reveals during public readings.
Trauma at the heart of his work
Her bibliography is essentially centered around an event recounted several times in her novels: incest and the influence exercised over her by her father. Among them, An impossible love, A week of vacation, Incest et The Journey to the East.
Her eruptive side is sometimes expressed in television interventions, such as the one where she launches to François Fillon, presidential candidate in 2017: “You will stop at nothing! Your word is dishonest”.
A clash that caught the attention of Laurent Ruquier, who entrusted him with the role of columnist in the show We are not in bed on France 2. Position that she will honor for two seasons.
For his part, Patrick Rambaud, who gives up his seat “due to his state of health”, becomes an honorary member (who no longer exercises the function but keeps the title) of the Académie Goncourt. Himself Prix Goncourt for The battle (Grasset) in 1997, Patrick Rambaud entered the Academy in 2008, succeeding Daniel Boulanger.
Chaired by Didier Decoin since January 2020, the Académie Goncourt has ten jurors, including now four women. In addition to Christine Angot, there are writers Camille Laurens (joined in 2020), Paule Constant (since 2013) and Françoise Chandernagor (since 1995).