2023-11-07 14:36:27
The 52-year-old novelist was elected in the 14th round. He faced Eric Reinhardt, Gaspard Koenig and Neige Sinno.
Jean-Baptiste Andrea was able to combine a dreamy personality and a focused creative method to succeed first in cinema, then in literature where he won the Goncourt prize on Tuesday, for Veiller sur elle.
He is still a “young” author, arriving at the novel in 2017. But here he is dedicated at 52 years old, for a love story at the time of fascism in Italy, which has already won the Fnac novel prize at the start of the school year.
“I wanted to write something bigger than what I had written before, to leave behind all the limits that I had initially imposed on myself in 20 years of cinema, since I was a screenwriter and director, but which I had also paradoxically imposed on my first three novels”, he explained at the end of October on France Inter.
The big screen was his first job, straight after studies which were not necessarily going to lead him there. After growing up on the shores of the Mediterranean, in Cannes, in a family which mixed Italian, Greek, Balearic and pied-noir origins from Algeria, he left for prestigious prestigious schools which reassured his parents, Sciences-Po Paris then a business school, ESCP.
“I hit a wall”
However, this fan of novels from a very young age only wanted to pursue one profession: writing. “After my studies I didn’t have a real job. I wrote straight away,” he told public radio.
He will break into the 7th art and notably write Hellphone, a teen movie with black humor by James Huth. He then directed his own films including Dead End in 2003, noted for its very dark humor.
In 2006, he convinced David Schwimmer (Ross in the series Friends) to take a leading role. And in 2013, his last turn at directing, with the thriller The Brotherhood of Tears. The review is mixed.
And at 45, in 2016, Jean-Baptiste Andrea is no longer sure he wants to once again embark on the immense undertaking of raising the budget for a film. “I felt like I was hitting a wall,” he recalled, interviewed by Actualitté this summer.
Why not finally write the novel he had in him? “I knew how to write a screenplay, not a novel. A screenplay is detailed, it’s comfortable, and in a novel anything goes,” he noted. He wrote My Queen, which he sent to around fifteen publishers.
“Breaking all boundaries”
Refused everywhere else, this novel about a cruel childhood excites Sophie de Sivry, founder of the publishing house L’Iconoclaste, who died last May. She is not the only one to get carried away: he wins the Envoyé par la Poste prize, which rewards authors who come without recommendation, as well as the Femina for high school students.
The Iconoclast is brooding over him. And if his second novel did less well, the third, Of Devils and Saints, was a great success, crowned with the RTL-Lire prize. “I left the world of cinema, I was a castaway from this world,” he said at the time on the radio. No regrets, however, after this “detour” via the big screen.
He can then embark on a fourth ambitious work, as he told France Inter. With the intellectual discipline that has always been his, as if he still separated script and filming.
“I prepare my entire story. This one is 10 months of preparation, in my head, in a notebook. I don’t write a line of the novel. And one day, I say to myself: my story is there, I So I can’t think twice and wonder where it’s going.”
“My first three novels were behind closed doors. There I wanted to break all boundaries,” he explains.
It will be a long fresco on sculpture and Italy, the country of his paternal grandmother. According to Le Monde, “a novel sculpted like a visitation, in the miracle of emergence”.
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