JI am happy, I exult. » Alain Lallemand reacts with joy: he is the winner of the 2024 Marcel Thiry prize for his novel What the river owes to the plain. The journalist from the Culture division of Evening has already received journalism awards for investigations into global cigarette trafficking, extrajudicial detentions in the United States, arms traffickers and private military companies, now joins the fairly closed circle of literary prize winners that matter.
And he can be fully satisfied with it since he won ahead of Jean-Claude Bologne for Rights-of-way. The Tales of Father Susar (Maelström), Claude Donnay for Ozane (MEO), Philippe Marczewski pour When Cécile (Threshold) and Jean-Luc Outers for My name won’t mean anything to you (Impressions nouvelles), which is not nothing.
The Marcel Thiry prize was established in 2001 by the city of Liège, keen to honor the memory of the poet, novelist, essayist and politician Marcel Thiry whose library and archives it preserves. It alternately rewards a poetic work (odd years) and a fictional work (even years) already published. The prize is worth 2,500 euros. The official presentation will take place on Friday December 6.
Inspiring reports
Alain Lallemand has been a reporter in a number of countries at war, open or latent: Kivu, Afghanistan, Colombia, Crimea. It is from his reports and his investigations that he draws the material for his novels. The man who depopulated the hillsit was in Kivu, And in the jungle, God dancedin Colombia, My most beautiful declaration of war et The female hero in Afghanistan. His prize-winning novel, What the river owes to the plaintakes place in Crimea, in 2014. During the annexation of Ukrainian Crimea by Putin’s Russian Federation, already. An annexation that the Ukrainians have never accepted and which they still strongly contest today.
Alain Lallemand was the special envoy of Evening in the peninsula washed by the Black Sea. He brought back everything that makes up the material for his novel: the landscapes, the horses, the people, Ukrainians and Russians, Tatars and Cossacks, the sensations, the smells, the enmities, the business… And he uses it to tell an eminently romantic, gripping and powerful story.
Alain Lallemand leads his beautiful characters, Oleg the Cossack, Kash the Tatar, the Roudakova sisters, in this changing world. A world of landscapes magnificently described in fine and often lyrical writing. With skillfully executed intrigues. Inhabited by heroes who move us, strewn with superb epic episodes and irrigated by this insidious Russian invasion. And which asks the essential questions of survival, friendship and love in times of occupation.
Alain Lallemand leads his beautiful characters, Oleg the Cossack, Kash the Tatar, the Roudakova sisters, in this changing world.
