The jury for the Public Prize, made up of 14 RTS listeners from the seven French-speaking cantons, awarded this Sunday “At the Heart of the Beast”, the first story by Lorrain Voisard, an Imerian author whose prose transposes with great skills from his few months of work in a French-speaking slaughterhouse.
In the book, blood pulses, flesh quivers and teeth grind. When reading, it is difficult to escape these movements. A powerful story of an immersion in a French-speaking slaughterhouse, “At the heart of the beast”, published by Éditions d’en bas, cannot leave you indifferent. Lorrain Voisard describes the screams, the cold, the smells and the death with the precision of an onboard reporter. A naturalist talent noticed by the RTS public jury, which made him its 2024 winner.
Presented this Sunday, November 24 as part of the radio program Quartier Livre (RTS Première), the 2024 Public Prize salutes a rare approach in French-speaking Switzerland. Explicitly part of a long literary lineage, which goes from Upton Sinclair to Joseph Pontus, from Emile Zola to Tristan Egolf, the first book by the author, born in 1987 in Saint-Imier, is inspired by the novelistic form to compose a first-person documentary.
An embedded nerd
A probable double of the author, the narrator Arthur Jolissaint is hired in a country slaughterhouse. An on-board intellectual as the “established” of the post-May 68 era could be, the young man discovers and describes with precision the gestures that this small society, overwhelmingly male, carried out to supply the meat industry.
No activism displayed, however, in this disturbing immersion. Despite the anguish and repulsion he experiences, the narrator refrains from any judgment as to the legitimacy of these factories of death, playing with the narrative form in a clever alternation between live reporting and the distance necessary for taking it. of conscience.
Absence of bias
This deliberate absence of bias worked, for the members of the jury, in favor of his story. At the end of a year of intense reading (nearly 40 books) and five deliberation sessions, the 14 participants in the jury, from the seven French-speaking cantons, selected four works: “Agnus Dei” by Julien Sansonnens (ed. de l’Aire), “What’s left of all that” by Fanny Desarzens (ed. Slatkine), “My God, let me win” by Sonia Baechler (ed. Bernard Campiche) and “At the Heart of the Beast.”
The latter won out by “the humanity that emerges from the social exchanges to which he bears witness, by the poetry and formal audacity of his narration, as well as by the absence of definitive judgment on the industry that he observes and described”, in the words of the jury. “The reader learns, is confronted with himself, is not amused but is carried away by a precise, lively and very evocative language,” underlines a member of the jury.
Endowed with 10,000 francs, the Prize was awarded to the winner at Nouveau Monde in Fribourg, during a public event organized in collaboration with the Textures festival. Lorrain Voisard succeeds Mélanie Richoz, and becomes the 38th author awarded this distinction created in 1987.
Each year, the RTS Public Prize supports authors who are Swiss or live in Switzerland. This is one of the most important literary prizes in French-speaking Switzerland, highlighting the role of cultural actor played for decades by the RTS in its public service mission.
Nicolas Julliard/mh
Subject covered in the show Quartier Livre on November 24, 2024 from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. on RTS Première
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