Jean-Baptiste Andrea, a filmmaker turned writer, won this Tuesday the Goncourt literary prize, the most prestigious in France. Andrea has won the award for her novel Veiller sur elle (take care of her), a love novel set in fascist Italy a century ago.
The jury, meeting at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, as required by the award ritual, maintained the suspense until the end. Andrea was among the favorites, but at the same level as Éric Reinhardt (author of Sarah, Susanne et l'écrivant) and Gaspart Koenig (Humus).
Andrea, 52 years old, has a somewhat unique career for a successful writer. Born into a family of pieds noirs (French expelled from Algeria after the independence of the North African country), the recent winner of the Goncourt dedicated himself to cinema for two decades, as a screenwriter, set designer and director, before making the leap to literature. He published his first novel, Ma reine, in 2017, and since then, every two years, he has released a new work. Veiller sur elle is his fourth novel.
The book is published in France by L'Iconoclaste. In Spain it will be published by the AdN publishing house in the spring of 2024. With this award, AdN adds the third Goncourt Prize to its catalogue, along with Their Children After Them, by Nicolas Mathieu, 'Not all men inhabit the world in the same way way', by Jean-Paul Dubois.
According to the newspaper Le Figaro, Veiller sur elle, of 600 pages, is at the same time a novel of love, revenge and also a picaresque in the style of Alexandre Dumas. The protagonists are a virtuous but poor sculptor, Mimo, and a rich heiress, Viola, daughter of a marquis.
The Goncourt is a purely symbolic monetary prize -10 euros-, but it guarantees a formidable international projection thanks to the large circulation and multiple translations. Among its winners are great names in French literature such as Marcel Proust, Pierre Lemaitre, Amin Maalouf, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir.
After the Goncourt was announced, the Renaudot prize was awarded, which went to Ann Scott for her novel Les Insolents, the story of a forty-year-old woman, composer of film soundtracks, who decides to leave Paris to reinvent herself in Brittany, a narrative with autobiographical overtones and also reflects vital itineraries that are not at all uncommon in France today. Scott is, like Andrea, an author with an unorthodox career, as she was a model and drummer in a punk group in London before devoting herself to writing.
