French-Venezuelan writer Miguel Bonnefoy, whose two books were also published in Czech, won the prestigious Grand Prize of the French Academy for a novel this Thursday. The jury honored him for a family saga called Le Rêve de jaguar, AFP reported.
The laureate was chosen only in the third round by the narrowest possible margin. Miguel Bonnefoy received eight votes, one more than Abel Quentin with the prose Cabane and Grégory Cingal with the title Les derniers sur la liste. “This means that the academy really liked all three finalists,” explains its permanent secretary Amin Maalouf.
The winning novel Le Rêve de jaguar, translated as The Jaguar’s Dream, begins in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where a beggar woman finds an abandoned newborn baby on the steps of a church. Hoch rises from poverty to become one of the most highly regarded surgeons in the country. He finds a wife and she gives birth to a daughter, who is symbolically named Venezuela. As an adult, she will head to Paris, while her son Cristobal, on the other hand, will return to his homeland, summarizes the newspaper Le Figaro.
According to him, Cristobal is the author’s alter ego. The weekly Le Point also notes that the writer closely connected the story of the family with the fate of his country and his own ancestors.
The book was published by the Parisian publishing house Rivages. Bonnefoy was born in the French capital into the family of a Venezuelan diplomat and a Chilean left-wing revolutionary, later a writer. He grew up in Europe and Latin America, but attended French schools everywhere. Today, he often writes in French about his ancestors from Chile and Venezuela. “I am not a person who would fight for just one banner. And I always argue for tolerance between nations,” he said in an interview last year.
Czech readers may be familiar with the prose works Černý cukr and Dědictví, translated by Markéta Krušinová, and published by the Argo publishing house in 2019 and 2022. He wrote Jaguar’s Dream as his tenth title.
The Grand Prize of the French Academy for the novel has existed since 1914, and is associated with a reward of 10,000 euros, i.e. about a quarter of a million crowns. In the autumn series of literary awards in France, it is usually awarded first. The Goncourt prize traditionally attracts the most attention. This year it will be handed over on November 4. Last year, Dominique Barbéris was the laureate of the Grand Prize of the French Academy for the novel.