The Medici Prize was awarded on Wednesday, November 6, to Julia Deck for an autobiographical novel dedicated to her mother, Anne of England(Threshold, 256 p., 20 euros). “I am very excited to have this award”declared the winner at the La Méditerranée restaurant in Paris. He won with five votes compared to Thomas Clerc’s four, in the third round.
Julia Deck, 50, traces the fate of her mother, born in Manchester in a working-class environment where books had no place. This woman will emancipate herself, emigrate to France and become passionate about literature and the arts. “The danger of autobiographical material is obviously to become fascinated by the subject and stop understanding things for the reader”said Julia Deck, interviewed by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“I have been fascinated by my mother’s romantic journey for a long time. Because he is a person born in a very modest environment, before the Second World War, where no one had studied, and who moved a lot, both socially and intellectually, artistically.he emphasized.
Kafka, an “important, profound, infinite” theme
The Medici Prize for foreign novels went to the Guatemalan Eduardo Halfon, for Tarantula (Quai Voltaire, 208 p., 17.50 euros). In the eighth round he obtained four votes, against two for the Austrian Josef Winkler. “I am happy, shocked, to arrive at this very official ceremony”said the winner, who came from Berlin, where he lives, after having lived in the United States and Paris.
“The book arises from a memory from my childhood, a tragic event, quite dark and dramatic, which I used as a starting point”to explore “my identity as a Guatemalan, and my identity as a Jew”he explained to AFP.
In this fiction, the narrator remembers a survival camp for Jewish children to which his parents sent him, a camp that caused him a trauma whose nature and ramifications he would only understand several decades later.
The Medici essay prize was awarded to the German Reiner Stach for the third volume of his biography of Franz Kafka, The years of youth (Le Cherche Midi, 800 p., 29.50 euros). It only took one round, in which he received six votes.
The vast project that consisted of translating a monumental book published between 2008 and 2014 into German was unanimously described as innovative, renewing both the biographical genre and the knowledge of the famous Prague novelist. The three volumes of the French translation total about 2,700 pages.
The global workshops
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The global workshops
“It was a risky and long-term adventure, because we couldn’t give up halfway. If the first volume didn’t meet its audience, we would still get to the end.”Cherche Midi general director Jean Le Gall told AFP. “Finally, readers discovered, on the occasion of this biography, a rather unclassifiable essay, how important, profound, infinite Kafka’s theme was”he added.
