This award is in addition to the Blù Jean-Marc Roberts prize and the Millepages bookstore prize.
In the winning novel, one day in May 1980, eight-year-old Ilaria gets into Fulvio’s car as he leaves school. From small hotels to motorway rest areas, father and daughter crisscross Italy. They wander, listen to the radio, play. Ilaria learns to drive and lie.
She discovered Milan, Trieste, boarding school in Rome, then a sunny peasant life in Sicily. The kidnapping resembles an almost normal childhood. But the father drinks too much, smokes too much, he is a “ nervous cheetah » in a cloud of nicotine.
This novel relates from the inside and without judgment the collapse of a little girl who must learn to live alone. The author aims for simplicity; anything but sentimentalism when she evokes a father caught in his own trap and a child trapped by conflicting loyalties. She decides to write in the light direction.
English, Italian and Swiss, Gabriella Zalapì lives in Paris. His writing reduced to the essentials earned his first novel, Antonia (Zoé, 2019), the Grand Prix for the heroine Madame Figaro 2019 and the Bibliomedia Prize 2020. Willibald (Zoé, 2022) is a novel about exile around the sacrifice of Abraham.
The winner of the Femina Prize for High School Students was announced on November 28 at the Tocqueville media library in Caen, and the award ceremony will take place in January 2025 in Le Havre, during the Le Gout des Autres festival, with the presence of class representatives. of high school students who participated in the vote.
Last year, in 2023, the prize was awarded to Eric Chacour for his novel What I know about you, published by Philippe Rey editions.
Find the list of French and French-speaking literary prizes
Photo credits: Roman Lusser (Zoé)
By Hocine Bouhadjera
Contact : [email protected]
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