The French writer Pierre Guyotat died on the night of Thursday to Friday, at the age of 80 – AFP
Thewriter Pierre Guyotat,
Medici Prize winner in 2018, died in the night of Thursday to Friday at the age of 80, his family announced Friday to the AFP.
Preferring discretion to light, the writer will remain as the author of two major works of French literature of the twentieth century: Tomb for five hundred thousand soldiers (1967), perhaps the largest book on the Algerian war (adapted by Antoine Vitez at Chaillot in 1981) and Eden, Eden, Eden (1970), a book deemed pornographic by the French authorities at the time, banned from advertising, display and sale to minors.
In 1970, this second book had missed the Medici prize by one voice. Furious at this rejection, Claude Simon, future Nobel Prize in literature, resigns from the jury. The scandal is immense.
“A goldsmith of letters”, “a unique artist”
The book ban was only lifted in 1981! Guyotat took his revenge 48 years later by receiving (finally) the Medici for Idiocy (Grasset), book in which he returned to his journey. Also in 2018, the writer was crowned with a special prize from the Femina jury and the prize for the French language for all of his work. Most of Pierre Guyotat’s books (novels, stories, poems and essays …) are deeply marked by his traumatic experience of the war
Algeria.
He died “overnight Thursday to Friday” at the hospital, his nephew Florent Guyotat told AFP. The first to react, former Minister of Culture Jack Lang expressed his “immense sorrow” after the disappearance of his “very dear friend”. “This literary goldsmith, a true virtuoso, poet possessed by words, was a unique artist, determined and demanding,” Jack Lang posted on his Twitter and Facebook accounts.
I learn with immense sorrow the disappearance of my very dear friend Pierre Guyotat. This literary goldsmith, a true virtuoso, poet possessed by words, was a unique, determined and demanding artist. https://t.co/phZH1sW5m7
– Jack Lang (@jack_lang) February 7, 2020
“Pierre Guyotat leaves an immense work, without concessions, luminous”, for his part said on Twitter the Minister of Culture Franck Riester.
The author of the Tomb for 500,000 soldiers is dead. Pierre Guyotat leaves an immense, uncompromising, luminous work. Few have taken the work on the French language so far and known how to express it, even in the suffering, life and beauty of the bodies. pic.twitter.com/XfyENI4BiD
– Franck Riester (@franckriester) February 7, 2020
“Few have taken the work on the French language so far and known how to express it, even in the suffering, life and beauty of the bodies”.
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