The novelist Gaël Faye, who was one of the favorites for the Goncourt, was awarded the Renaudot prize on Monday for his second novel Jacarandaon the reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.
While in the first Small countryGoncourt prize for high school students in 2016 and huge bookstore success translated into several languages, the author took the point of view of a boy who grew up in Burundi, this time the narrator grew up in France, in Versailles, from a father French and a Rwandan mother.
This young man, Milan, will discover Kigali, the omnipresence of the memory of the genocide, and members of his family.
It’s “a lot of joy, a big surprise,” reacted Gaël Faye at the Drouant restaurant, where the Renaudot and Goncourt prizes are traditionally awarded, awarded Monday to the Franco-Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud for his novel Houris (ed. Gallimard), on the massacres of “the black decade” in Algeria.
A 42-year-old Franco-Rwandan, Gaël Faye has an atypical profile in the French literary landscape: between slam, music and literature, he is an artist with multiple talents, whose pen is as alert as his themes are serious.
“Such a prestigious prize for a novel also gives the possibility that the story continues to circulate, that it goes to places where it was perhaps not planned, and that is what I hope for. this novel,” he told the press.
Houristhe Goncourt prize, and Jacarandathe Renaudot prize, “these are books that talk about the 90s: they are also conflicts, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, which took place at a time when the world was still different, we had not yet internet,” he commented.
“Were the 30 years which separate us from the event a necessary time for us, as writers, as authors, to be able to take the time to step back to put words to this violence which arrived and which continues to have an impact on our societies today?”, he asked.
The Renaudot jury has a rotating presidency which this year went to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Nobel Prize for Literature 2008. However, we knew that he really liked Gaël Faye’s book.
“We are crowning a slammer, a rapper and also all of his work as a musician and as a novelist,” one of the other Renaudot jurors, Frédéric Beigbeder, told AFP.
“In his work, music and literature respond to each other, feed each other. And that is also important because we often criticize literary prizes for having a bit of blinders in a closed world,” he said.
