In France, literary juries hand out greater than 2,000 prizes annually.
Paris-based literary journalist Olivia Snaije has reported on a lot of them. However the brand new Prix Monte-Cristo, she says, is totally different. Right here, the judges are chosen from amongst people who find themselves detainees in Europe’s largest jail, Fleury-Mérogis.
The Prix Monte-Cristo jury begins with a sensible class (which maybe ought to occur with extra literary juries). Then jury members select an eight-book longlist. On the finish, they confer an award.
Dressing up Detention?
This isn’t the one literary prize with a jail focus, unintended or in any other case. Detained asylum seeker Behrouz Boochani just lately gained Australia’s richest literary prize. PEN America runs an annual jail writing contest for folks experiencing incarceration. Actually, prisoners ought to have entry to lit prizes (as they need to have entry, for example, to the vote). However when mass incarceration creates a special world of socio-economic exclusion, it’s arduous to not really feel a bit of queasy about lit-award ceremonies.
But Snaije mentioned, in a back-and-forth over Twitter, that the jury members “have been terribly excited concerning the undertaking[.]” She added that “they cherished studying and studying to learn, the president of the jury is Colombian and had learn all of Garcia Marquez in highschool and now was discovering up to date French literature. The instructor was superb too.”
On the Theme of Confinement
The literary prize was based by author-translator Michèle Gazier, publicist Roxane Defer, and author-editor Maëlle Guillaud. Jurors select an eight-book longlist from amongst books written by “a French or Francophone creator.” Books should be “on the theme of confinement, and never essentially pertaining to incarceration.”
The winner receives the award on the jail and autographs a duplicate of the profitable e book for every juror.
Snaije mentioned that it was significantly necessary “that the creator can come to the jail to be awarded the prize.”
This 12 months, she reported, prize-winning authors Émilie de Turckheim and Daniel Pennac each visited the imprisoned jury. Gazier additionally introduced that subsequent 12 months’s patron of the Prix Monte-Cristo might be Morocco-born creator Tahar Ben Jelloun, who was imprisoned within the 1960s and in addition wrote about jail in This Blinding Absence of Mild.
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