The Femina 2024 prize was awarded on Tuesday, November 5, to Miguel Bonnefoy for his novel The Dream of the Jaguar, announced the author’s press officer and Rivages editions at Franceinfo. The exclusively female jury, meeting at the Carnavalet museum in Paris, rewarded the37-year-old Franco-Venezuelan author for his novel crossing the destiny of a family and the history of Venezuela.
“It’s a prize I’ve been waiting for for ten years”declared the winner, Who won with five votes to four for Emma Becker with Pretty Evil. Miguel Bonnefoy succeeds Neige Sinno, rewarded in 2023 for her novel sad tiger. On October 24, he had already won the Grand Prix du roman from the French Academy.
In this novel, the writer embarks on an odyssey to the country of “Little Venice”, Venezuela, and more precisely to Maracaibo in the footsteps of Antonio. A mute beggar takes in the orphan on the steps of a church, without suspecting the extraordinary destiny that awaits the child.
Raised in poverty, Antonio was in turn a cigarette seller, a porter on the docks, a servant in a brothel before becoming, thanks to his bubbling energy, one of the most famous surgeons in his country.
The Jaguar’s Dream is the story of a family saga that merges with the history of Venezuela. The novel, which flirts with storytelling and magical realism, tells the story of the grandfather of the Franco-Venezuelan author.
“I have always heard the story of the fate of my grandfather, a street orphan, gavroche and rufian, child of poverty and ignorance, who became a cardiologist and founder of the first university of Maracaibo, thus saving both the hearts of men and that of knowledge”,confides Miguel Bonnefoy.
Another South American was rewarded, with the Femina prize for foreign novel, the Chilean of Palestinian origin Alia Trabucco Zeran, for Own (Robert Laffont editions). “It is an honor that Own the first Latin American novel to win the Foreign Femina Prize” she said.
The Femina essay prize was awarded to Paul Audi for Stand your ground (Stock), an essay on anti-Semitism in France whose writing has been disrupted by events in the Middle East since October 7, 2023.I feel in some way inclined to defend the fight against anti-Semitism from a point of view which is not, precisely, that of a Jew, because I am not one.“, declared this Franco-Lebanese philosopher. A special prize was also awarded to the Irishman Colm Toibin, for Long Island (Grasset). Present at the award ceremony, he thanked the translator of his fifteen books, Anna Gibson.
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