Kevin Lambert won the December prize on Tuesday, becoming the youngest winner at 31 to win this coveted award in France for his strong endowment.
• Also read: The Quebec author Kevin Lambert, at the center of a controversy, finalist for the Médicis Prize
• Also read: Prix Goncourt: The favorites remain in the race, Kevin Lambert is eliminated
The Quebecer is rewarded for “Let our joy remain” (editions of Nouvel Attila), a fiction about the downfall of an architect accused of driving the poor out of Montreal.
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The prize was created in 1989 (under the name Novembre Prize) to honor a novel that had been forgotten by the other autumn literary prizes. But this year it is ahead of the other major prizes such as the Femina, the Goncourt, the Renaudot and the Médicis.
It is endowed with 15,000 euros and is supported by the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation.
With his novel published in Canada in September 2022, a sharp criticism of the good conscience of those in power, Kevin Lambert has aroused critical enthusiasm in France.
L’Obs praised “a dazzling and cruel fresco” and Le Monde “the skill” of an ambitious writer, thanks to which “the reader becomes dizzy.”
However, in September, the publisher fueled the controversy by revealing that the author had employed the services of a Canadian-Haitian proofreader to check the credibility of a character of Haitian descent.
While the intervention of a “sensitivity reader” is common in North America, it is far less common in France. A former Goncourt Prize winner, Nicolas Mathieu, said he refused to make “experts in sensibilities, experts in stereotypes, specialists in what is accepted and dared at a given moment, the compass of our work.”
Kevin Lambert said little on the subject. His editor reported his comments that this proofreader, Chloé Savoie-Bernard, “made sure that I didn’t say too much nonsense, that I didn’t fall into certain traps of portraying black people.”