French writer Dominique Barbéris won the prestigious Académie française Grand Prize for the novel this Thursday evening for a love story set in the era of colonialism. This was reported by the AFP agency. The jury chose the winner in the first round.
The 65-year-old academic has been teaching literature at the Sorbonne in Paris for over four decades. She published her first novel in 1996, two years later she moved to the renowned publishing house Gallimard, where this year she also published a winning prose called Une façon d’aimer.
It takes place in Cameroon’s largest city, Douala, shortly before this country in equatorial Africa gained independence in 1960. The writer was born in Cameroon in 1958. She dedicated the novel to the memory of her father, who left France for Africa in the early 1950s. The heroine of the story is Madeleine from Brittany, who moves to Cameroon because of her husband’s job and falls in love there at a ball.
The Grand Prize of the French Academy for a novel is associated with a reward of 10,000 euros, i.e. about a quarter of a million crowns. A book published by Gallimard received it for the third time in a row this year. He already succeeded the year before last, when the writer François-Henri Désérable rejoiced, and again last year, when Giuliano da Empoli won with a book inspired by the real adviser of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In the autumn series of literary awards in France, the Grand Prize of the French Academy for the novel, which has existed since 1914, is awarded first. The Goncourt prize traditionally attracts the most attention. This year it will be handed over on November 7.
