Prix ​​Goncourt 2024: one of these four writers is biding his time

It is as tradition dictates from the Drouot restaurant in the 7th arrondissement, where they will have deliberated all morning and then voted, that the members of the Académie Goncourt will award the 2024 Goncourt Prize this Monday, November 4 at midday. The first under the presidency of the writer Philippe Claudel who succeeded his colleague Didier Decoin in the spring. After the coronation of Jean-Baptiste Andrea with Watch over her last year, two men and two women dreamed of writing their name on the list. TF1info makes the presentations…

Kamel Daoud with “Houris” (Gallimard)

Parisian rumors make him the big favorite with this novel as intimate as it is political. In Houristhis 54-year-old Franco-Algerian writer and journalist slips into the shoes of Aube, a young pregnant woman who tells her unborn little daughter about the massacre of her family, perpetrated on December 31, 1999 by Islamists who tried to kill her. slit her throat, leaving her disfigured and mute. Criticism of radical Islam, which earned him a fatwa in his country of birth, he won the Goncourt for the first novel in 2015 for Meursault, counter-investigationsurprising response to The Stranger d’Albert Camus.

Sandrine Collette with “Madeleine before dawn” (JC Lattès)

Slowly, but surely, this 53-year-old former HR consultant who divides her time between Paris and Morvan, where she raises horses, has established herself as one of the most unique novelists of her generation, mixing the dark novel with his passion for nature. In Madeleine with the dawnit depicts the irruption of a wild child into a rural community whose patriarchal codes she dynamites. Hailed by critics and a great success in bookstores, in line with his previous book, We were wolvesrewarded with the Renaudot des lycéens.

Gaël Faye with “Jacaranda” (Grasset)

This is undoubtedly the first time that a rapper has been a candidate for the Prix Goncourt. And among the four finalists please! Author of several successful albums, solo or with his accomplice Grand Corps Malade, Gaël Faye, 42, made a remarkable entry into literature in 2016 with Small countryinspired by his painful youth in Rwanda and of which he co-signed the adaptation for the cinema. Popular success of the literary season, also praised by critics, Jacaranda tells the story of Milan, a mixed-race Franco-Rwandan confronted with his mother’s silence on the 1994 genocide. He then takes him on an initiatory journey across the earth of its origins.

Hélène Gaudy with “Archipels” (L’Olivier)

More confidential than her rivals, this novelist who attended the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts had until now published several historical novels such as A world without shorethe portrait of missing polar explorers which appeared on the first Goncourt list in 2019. She finds herself today in the final square with Archipelagosa more personal work since she explores the multiple lives of her own father, painter and poet, from childhood to the confines of Louisiana.