The writer Christine Angot was elected, Tuesday, February 28, member of the Goncourt Academy, which awards the most prestigious prize for French literature each year, the Academy announced on Twitter.
Prix ??Médicis in 2021 for her novel Le Voyage dans l’Est, which deals with the pain linked to incest, the subject of several of her novels, she will succeed Patrick Rambaud and sit at the next meeting of the Goncourt Academy on April 4.
A sometimes eruptive personality, adored or hated for her media interventions, Christine Angot, 64, expresses the essence of her truth in her work, which she comments on little but reveals during public readings.
A work essentially centered around an event recounted several times in his novels: incest and the influence that his father exerted on her. Among them, An Impossible Love, A Week Vacation, Incest and The Journey to the East.
Patrick Rambaud becomes an honorary member
Her eruptive side is sometimes expressed in television interventions, such as the one where she launches to François Fillon, presidential candidate in 2017: “You will stop at nothing! Your word is dishonest.” A clash that caught the attention of Laurent Ruquier, who entrusted her with the role of columnist in the program “We are not lying” on France 2.
For his part, Patrick Rambaud, who gives up his seat “due to his state of health”, becomes an honorary member – who no longer exercises the function but retains the title – of the Goncourt Academy. Prix ??Goncourt for La Bataille (Grasset) in 1997, Patrick Rambaud entered the Académie Goncourt in 2008, succeeding Daniel Boulanger.
Chaired by Didier Decoin since January 2020, the Goncourt Academy has ten jurors, including now four women. In addition to Christine Angot, there are writers Camille Laurens (joined in 2020), Paule Constant (since 2013) and Françoise Chandernagor (since 1995).
