On November 4, the award ceremony for the Apollinaire Prize and the Apollinaire Découverte Prize was held at Les Deux Magots, in the presence of Catherine Mathivat, president of this emblematic literary café, and with the participation of Aïssa Maïga who read extracts award-winning collections.
Michèle Finck, distinguished this year by the Apollinaire Prize, is an artist with many hats: poet, critic, translator, librettist, screenwriter, pianist and academic. She has seven collections of poems to her credit, including Dazzled hearing (Voice of Ink, 2007), babbling (Arfuyen, 2012), The Third Hand (Arfuyen, 2015, Louise Labé Prize), Knowledge through tears (Arfuyen, 2017, Max Jacob Prize), On a straw piano (Arfuyen, 2020), The Ballad of the Cloudmen (Arfuyen, 2022) and the recent The open sea (Arfuyen, 2024, Prix Vénus Khoury-Ghata), for which she was honored with the Prix Apollinaire.
In La Voie du Large, Michèle Finck alternates poems and prose texts, letter-poems and incantations, in an intense, vibrant, moving writing. An interior museum marked by omnipresent doubt. The time is when we could live shut up in a tiny room under a pointed roof. For her, we should never separate how to write from how to live.
By constantly remaining attentive to the world. A meditation between wakefulness and sleep, between pandemic and experience of mourning. Collapse of a world. With the only answer: I slip into poetry/ through the backstage: the correspondence of poets/ and I dance.
– Juror Jean-Yves Reuzeau
Born in 1981, Blandine Merle, a graduate of Modern Literature, works as a teacher in a college in Poitiers. In 2011, she took a break from her career at National Education to devote herself to writing and published her first collection of poems.By obole with Cheyne publisher, which earned him the Vocation Prize. His next work, To be born and to die, was published by Éditions Gallimard and won the Apollinaire Découverte Prize this year.
To be born and to die. We know the program. And between the two what we call life. The repudiated of poetry, from the time when she relied on the form alone, swinging between the game of rickshaws and scrabble, the repetition being worth for a word counts double.
Too miserable, too laborious, life: The embroiderer has only the existence of her bent forehead/ in the evening light. And at the same time as Vermeer we think of Pascal who made little difference between the profession of poet and that of embroiderer. (…) Ulysses shouts: it’s that way. Over there, this roundabout of death where the other side is not visible, where memory and lack come back to us like a boomerang. What Homer and the Bible already knew, and we wonder why we read anything else. Ah yes, To be born and to die. »
– Juror Jean Rouaud
Chaired by Jean-Pierre Siméon, the jury is made up of personalities from the world of poetry: Marc Alyn, Adeline Baldacchino, Linda Maria Baros (general secretary), Tahar Ben Jelloun, Zéno Bianu, Patricia Castex Menier, Philippe Delaveau, Anne Dujin, Jean Portante and Jean Rouaud, joined on November 4, 2024 by Jean-Yves Reuzeau.
The Apollinaire Prize and the Apollinaire Découverte Prize are endowed thanks to the generosity of Catherine Mathivat, president of Deux Magots.
List of French and Francophone literary prizes
By Hocine Bouhadjera
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