Farida Khelfa wins the Vaudeville Prize for “A French Childhood”

In this autobiography, this great figure of Parisian fashion and nightlife of the 1980s looked back on his childhood shattered by incest and violence.

Farida Khelfa received the Vaudeville prize this Monday, June 10, for her work “A French Childhood,” published in January by Albin Michel. The book by this great fashion figure, also a director and producer of documentary films, will be featured for a year in the window of the Vaudeville brasserie, in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris. She succeeds Raphaël Haroche, winner of the prize in 2023, and will receive 5,000 euros.

Born to Algerian parents, Farida Khelfa was raised in the Cité des Minguettes in Lyon. At 15, she fled to Paris and discovered the world of the night. With Christian Louboutin, the future novelist Eva Ionesco or the upcoming decorator Vincent Darré, she formed “the little Palace gang”. Self-proclaimed “first suburban “Rebeue” model”, she works as a stylist for Jean-Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaïa. She shared the life of Jean-Paul Goude for several years. Married in 2012 to businessman Henri Seydoux, she has made films about her friends Jean-Paul Gaultier and Christian Louboutin, about the Arab revolutions, but also behind the scenes of Nicolas Sarkozy’s electoral campaign.

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“A French Childhood” came to him just hours after his mother’s funeral. There she recounts for the first time the fate of her family of Algerian immigrants: the miserable HLMs, the men broken by illiteracy and colonization, the petrified mothers. In the middle, a family of nine brothers and sisters raised in incredible violence. As Farida Khelfa told our comrade Anna Topaloff last January, the father reigns terror in his home, tyrannizes his wife, hits his children and regularly rapes one of his sisters. Still a young schoolgirl, Farida is abused by an uncle with whom her mother drops her off at the weekend. “I wanted to break the legacy of silence »she explains, because most of those close to her, and even her own sons, now adults, were unaware of the extent of the abuse she suffered.

“They knew that it wasn’t the house party, that I had run away at 15… But the rest, the details, I was never able to talk to them about it. We can’t say that, only write it. »

To note : The Vaudeville Prize jury is made up of François Armanet (president), Bayon, Anna Cabana, Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre, Clara Dupont-Monod, Alix Girod de L’Ain, Marc Lambron, Gilles Martin-Chauffier, Fabienne Pascaud, Bertrand de Saint-Vincent (general secretary).

Note again: The latest news from the literary prizes can be found here.