Christine Angot wins the Medicis 2021 prize for her novel “Le Voyage dans l’Est” – franceinfo

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In this book, the writer returns to the incest of which she was the victim on the part of her father.

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It is the second literary prize of the season. After the Femina prize, it is the turn of the Médicis prize to reward three authors in the categories French novel, foreign novel and essay, Tuesday October 26th. In this literary season marked by several novels on harmful parents, Christine Angot won the prize in the French novel category with The Journey to the East (ed. Flammarion), in which the writer looks back on the incest she suffered from her father.

The trauma of her childhood, the incest committed by her father, Christine Angot told for the first time in Incest (1999), then in A week of vacation, in 2012, then she had recounted its genesis in An impossible love, in 2015. The novelist returns once again to the horrors suffered by her incestuous father in The trip to the east, published in August by Flammarion editions, always in contention for the Goncourt. “There is no more hope. There is no longer the idea that life is there and that there is something in store for the future”, confided Christine Angot in an interview with Brut.

Incest, she was 13 when she first suffered it. Its consequences, she will suffer them all her life. Christine Angot testifies.
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the jury also distinguishedé theSwedish Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The paternal clause (ed. Actes Sud) in the foreign novel category and Jakuta Alikavazovic for Like a sky in us (ed. Stock) in the essay category.

In 2020, it was Chloé Delaume who won the prize in the French novel category for Synthetic Heart (Threshold ed.). Antonio Munoz Molina (A lonely walker in the crowd) and Karl Ove Knausgaard (End of fight) had won the Medici Prize for Foreign Novel and Essay.