Miguel Bonnefoy crowned for “The Dream of the Jaguar”

The Femina novel prize was awarded on Tuesday November 5 to the Franco-Venezuelan writer Miguel Bonnefoy, for The Jaguar's Dreamalready crowned with the Grand Prix du roman of the French Academy in October. He won with five votes, compared to four for Emma Becker with Pretty Evil.

« It’s a prize I’ve been waiting for for ten years.”declared the winner, at the Carnavalet-Histoire museum in Paris, recalling that his mother tongue was not French but Spanish. Between South America and France, The Jaguar's Dreampublished by Rivages, is in line with the family sagas of this 37-year-old author.

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 +Proper+ is 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.