She succeeds the Mage of the Kremlin, Italian-Swiss Giuliano da Empoli. Author Dominique Barbéris won the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française on Thursday October 26 with A Way of Loving, a fiction which tells a love story during the colonial era. The author was chosen in the first round by gathering 14 votes, against 6 for Antoine Sénanque and 4 for Sarah Chiche. “I am both very moved and infinitely honored to receive this prize,” declared the laureate during the proclamation in the salons of the Académie française.
Dominique Barbéris, 65, is an academic who taught literature for forty years at the Sorbonne University in Paris. It tells the story of an adulterous love in Douala shortly before the independence of Cameroon. This novel “is dedicated to the memory of my father, who left for Africa in 1950. I know that my mother reads it and rereads it saying: I am going back to Douala,” declared the winner after the award was announced. “It won’t remove doubt about the quality of what I write. But I have thirty years of writing behind me, and God knows it’s a wonderful recognition,” she added.
This is the third year in a row that a novel published by Editions Gallimard has been crowned with this prize, after those of François-Henri Désérable in 2021 and Giuliano Da Empoli in 2022. The season of major autumn literary prizes continues until November, with the most prestigious of them, the Goncourt, awarded on the 7th.
