“It’s an award I’ve been waiting for for ten years. So you can imagine how honored I am, I am happy,” declared the winner, at the Carnavalet-Histoire museum in Paris.
“I am also touched because my mother tongue is Spanish, and therefore to distinguish a book which is in French, that is to say which is not written in my mother tongue, I find that it speaks a lot, that speaks very well about France,” he added.
The Jaguar’s Dreampublished by Rivages, is in the line of family sagas between South America and France by this 37-year-old author.
He won in the second round thanks to five votes, compared to four for Emma Becker with Pretty Evil (Albin Michel editions).
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 Own “the first Latin American novel to win the Foreign Femina Prize,” she declared.
“Today, as a descendant of Palestinians […] I can’t keep quiet. Day after day, before our eyes, the horror in Palestine continues. Horror always spreads in silence. Let’s continue to raise our voices, thank you,” she added.
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 philosopher Franco-Lebanese.
A special prize was also awarded to the Irishman Colm Toibin, for his entire body of work, including his latest novel Long Island (Grasset). At the award ceremony, he thanked the translator of his 15 books, Anna Gibson.
“I know that my character, in Long Island et BrooklynI know it is fictional. But I wanted to assure you how she would vote today. In the novel there is a short sentence, which only says: she became an American when she began to hate Nixon,” he explained.
After the Goncourt prize to Kamel Daoud and the Renaudot prize to Gaël Faye on Monday, the season of major autumn literary prizes continues on Wednesday with the Médicis prize.
