The author of “Tropique de la violence” and “Le Dernier Frère”, a native of Mauritius, will be honored at the Book Fair for her body of work. She joins a prestigious list of winners that includes Annie Ernaux. The award will be presented to her at the Brive Book Fair on November 4, 5 and 6.
It is one of the most beautiful literary awards, this prize is not necessarily known by the public, but it includes its winners in a list of authors living of requirement and quality: the Prize of the French language 2022 was awarded to Nathacha Appanah, novelist who deserves this crowning by the quality of her work. The jury is prestigious, composed of immortals, Goncourt academics and writers: Laure Adler, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Éric Fottorino, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, Paula Jacques, Dany Laferrière, Alain Mabanckou, Éric Neuhoff, Jean-Noël Pancrazi, Danièle Sallenave.
Nathacha Appanah joins quite a list of winners; impossible to name them all, we note the presence of the recent Nobel Prize of literature, Annie Ernaux, as well as Pierre Guyotat, Pascal Quignard, Jacqueline de Romilly, Emmanuel Carrère, Mona Ozouf, Jean Rolin, Alain Rey, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Bernard Pivot, among others…
Nathacha Appanah was born on May 24, 1973, in Mahébourg; she spent the first five years of her childhood in the North of Mauritius, in Piton. She first embarked on a career as a journalist before devoting herself fully to literature. The writer, whose family is of Indian descent, recounted in her first novel, Les Rochers de Poudre d’Or (Gallimard, 2003), those Indians who had come to replace the emancipated slaves in the cane fields, her ancestors.
After her first literary attempt in Mauritius, she moved to France at the end of 1998, first to Grenoble, then to Lyon, where she completed her training in journalism and publishing. It was then that she wrote her first novel, Les Rochers de Poudre d’Or, which was published by Gallimard in 2003. Awarded́ the RFO Book Prize and the Rosine-Perrier Prize, it inaugurates the career of a prolific author, winner of numerous prizes: the Fnac Novel Prize for Le Dernier Frère (Editions de l’Olivier), the Femina Prize for high school students, the France Télévisions Prize, the Metis Readers’ Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize for high school students for her work “Tropique de la violence” (Gallimard), which has been made into a film and adapted for the stage… His latest novel, Rien ne t’appartient (Gallimard), was published in 2021. Each of his titles brings out his style and prose. And this French Language Prize comes as a reward for a work of quality, which has not finished blossoming.
From Mayotte, where she lived for two years, she brought back the poignant Tropique de la violence (Gallimard, 2016), a multi-award winner including the Prix Femina des lycéens. Each new book shows the extent of her curiosity for human, motherhood with La Noce d’Anna, to the more universal Le Dernier Frère, about the exile of Eastern European Jews in Mauritius in 1940. Appanah’s language? A discreet, graceful, and constant power of emotions, at the service of what is on the margins of our gaze, and which relentlessly attracts hers.
