Julia Deck rewarded for “Ann of England”

Author Julia Deck won the Medici Prize this Wednesday for her autobiographical novel. Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon and Reiner Stach, Kafka’s German biographer, are also rewarded.

Lhe Medici Prize jury demonstrated, once again this year, its finesse and high standards by delivering, this Wednesday, November 6, its impeccable 2024 prize list: Julia Deck, Eduardo Halfon, Reiner Stach.

To the first, Julia Deck, therefore goes the prize in the French Novels category, for Ann of England, very personal novel, dedicated to his mother. The jury decided by five votes against four to Thomas Clerc for Paris, museum of the 21st century. “More autobiographical, more serious than Julia Deck’s five previous novels – including the mischievous Viviane ­Élisabeth Fauville (2012), Private property (2019) et Monument national (2022) –, Ann of England sets out to reconnect the bonds between a brilliant and daring British mother and her only daughter, self-described as depressed and shady, damaged by her parents’ divorce”, wrote Télérama, reporting a few weeks ago on a novel which also knows how to be a “luminous tribute to writing, to literature”.

As for foreign novels, the prize (finally!) highlights the unique work of Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon, rewarding his latest published book, Tarantula (translated from Spanish by David Fauquemberg, ed. Quai Voltaire). A delicate and melancholy opus, like all the fictions of the author of Monasteryof Mournings – in total around ten works, faithfully translated for a decade by Quai Voltaire editions, directed by Alice Déon. As for the Medici essay prize, it salutes the extraordinary work of Reiner Stach, the German biographer of Kafka: three volumes (The Time for Decisions, Then The time of knowledge, and finally The years of youth, translated by Régis Quatresous at Editions du Cherche-Midi), some two thousand fascinating pages in total, which together retrace the existence and explore the unfathomable mystery of the brilliant writer from Prague.

The finalists for the 2024 Medici Prize

French novels

Miguel Bonnefoy, The Jaguar’s Dream (Shore)
Thomas Clerc, Paris, museum of the 21st century (Midnight)
Julia Deck, Ann of England (Threshold)
Shane Haddad, Love Gil (P.O.L)
Emmanuelle Lambert, No Respect (Stock)
Abdellah Taia, The Bastion of Tears (Julliard)
Félicia Viti, The Vertical Girl (Gallimard)
Cécile Wajsbrot, Full Sky (The Sound of Time)
Gabriella Zalapi, Ilaria (Zoe)

Foreign novels

Mircea Cărtărescu, Théodoros, translated from Romanian by Laure Hinkel (Black on White)
Amira Ghenim, The Disaster of the house of notables, translated from Arabic (Tunisia) by Souad Labbize (Philippe Rey)
Edward Halfon, Tarantula, translated from Spanish (Guatemala) by David Fauquemberg (Quai Voltaire)
Benjamin Labatut, Maniac, translated from English (Chile) by David Fauquemberg (Grasset)
Marco Lodoli, So little, translated from Italian by Louise Boudonnat (POL)
Alia Trabucco Zerán, Own, translated from Spanish (Chile) by Anne Plantagenet (Robert Laffont)
Undine Radzeviciutė, The Library of Beauty and Evil, translated from Lithuanian by Margarita Barakauskaité-Le Borgne (Viviane Hamy)
Camila Sosa Villada, History of domestication, translated from Spanish (Argentina) by Laura Alcoba (Métailié)
Josef Winkler, The Field, translated from German (Austria) by Bernard Banoun (Verdier)

Trials

Justine Augier, Legal entity (South Acts)
Éliane Brum, Banzeiro Okoto. Amazon, the center of the world (Basement)
Deborah Costes, Take back body (Globe)
Grégory Delaplace, The Voice of Ghosts (Threshold)
Martine Delvaux, It could have been a movie (Heliotrope)
Yann Diener, Freud’s Jaw (The Surveyor)
Anna Funder, L’Invisible Madame Orwell, translated from English (Australia) by Carine Chichereau (Héloïse d’Ormesson)
Maïa Hruska, Ten Versions of Kafka (Grasset)
Reiner Stach, Kafka. The Years of Youth (volume 3), translated from German by Régis Quatresous (Le Cherche-Midi)
Jacques Rancière, Freedom in the distance. Essay on Chekhov (The Factory)