Olivier Norek meets the students who awarded him the Renaudot prize for high school students

The winner of the 2024 Renaudot prize for high school students, Olivier Norek, for “The Winter Warriors”, went to meet the high school students of Loudun, in Vienne. The novel tells about the fighters of the war between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939-1940.

At the table at which he sits, Olivier Norek does not hide his pleasure. Book after book, he signs, always with the same smile. This Tuesday, the winner of the 2024 Renaudot prize for high school students was in Loudun, in Vienne, for a meeting with the high school students who voted for his novel on the Russo-Finnish war of 1939-1940 for their prize.

“We manage to put ourselves in the shoes of the characters,testifies Evan, a first grade student at Saint-Maixent-École (Deux-Sèvres). In the shoes of a man during the war. I think it’s interesting.”

During discussions with the high school students, the author reminds them that they were the “actors of tomorrow”with the hope that they will build a better world. Because his novel does indeed speak of war and resistance.

His ambitious story of Finland’s resistance to the invasion of the Soviet giant centers on Simo Häyhä, a peasant gifted with a rifle who, by transforming into a sniper, will become a national hero and a legend of the country’s military history. . He will be nicknamed the “White Death”.

When the USSR invaded Finland at the end of 1939, the world was outraged by the aggression. The country, very small compared to its neighbor, will resist courageously.

Winter Warriorspublished by Michel Lafon, is a novel about soldiers.

“Simo Häyhä was silent. I added a writing challenge to myself: Simo will never speak. It’s a book about him, basically, about Simo Häyhä, and he won’t say a word. Why? I I know so little about him that I want to respect his life’s work, because he didn’t want us to know more than that about him.”explains Olivier Norek to AFP.

After having killed more than 500 enemies, this simple peasant, of very small stature, lived far from honors, in his countryside.

He was frustrated at not being able to fight, because of a bullet which almost cost him his life and tore off his jaw, during the second war that Finland led against the USSR, known as the Continuation War, between 1941 and 1944. He died in 2002, at the age of 96.

To a journalist who asked him at the very end of his life what he felt after his first fatal shot, he responded coldly: “The recoil of my weapon”.

“Simo, from what I know, from the people who met and knew him, because I also met people who spent time with him, he was not a braggart”comments the novelist.

What was it like for these men to pull the trigger and kill for the first time?

“The Finns wrote about the Winter War, giving the weight of the bullets, the uniforms, the troop movements… They were never interested in the question: what did it do to these men to press the relaxation and killing for the first time?”

To read everything that had been written on the subject, he required the services of a dedicated translator, Louis Clerc, a historian from the University of Turku (southern Finland).

After 113 days of combat, the Soviet Union, despite much superior but inadequate means, made very little progress in Finnish territory, with disproportionate losses. She ended the disaster with a treaty that allowed her to annex Karelia.

“The lesson of this war is this tendency of the Russians to underestimate the adversary, to start quite triumphantly and then to trip over themselves. And the lack of consideration for their own soldiers”describes today the author of Winter Warriors.