The Prix Médicis was awarded this Tuesday to Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, for the novel The Thirteenth Hour.
Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam won the Medici prize for the French novel on Tuesday with “La Thirteenth Hour” (POL editions).
The winner, a 56-year-old French teacher, writes from the point of view of a teenager, Farah, and her family, invested in a church founded by the father, who finds herself around poetry readings.
“I’m delighted. I feel like I’m part of a line,” the winner told the press, citing former winners like Georges Perec, Mathieu Lindon and Marie Darrieussecq.
“A tribute to poetry”
“It’s a novel, of course, but also a tribute to poetry (…) I can only repeat my pride in having this very fine prize,” said the novelist, who also won the Landerneau readers’ prize. for this book.
The Medici Prize for Foreign Novel went to Andrei Kurkov for Gray Bees (Liana Levi editions), a novel about the absurdity of the conflict triggered by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
The Médicis Prize for Essay was awarded to Georges Didi-Huberman for “The Witness to the End” (Editions de Minuit).
“This little book that was elected – I thank you so much – it is a small volume on a case that deserved it”, explained the philosopher. He dedicates this book to Victor Klemperer, “a great philologist who chose to stay in Dresden” under Nazism to study the changes in the German language under a totalitarian regime.
A last great autumn literary prize remains to be awarded, the Interallié on Wednesday.