Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel received on Saturday evening in New York, from the hands of French author Anne Berest, the Goncourt Prize in its American version for A Human Sum, a reward awarded by French-speaking students from universities in the United States.
The most prestigious of the French literary prizes has become internationalized with “Goncourt prize selections” in 35 countries that must be decided between students of French and Francophone literature.
For its second edition in the United States, the Académie Goncourt unveiled the “Goncourt United States Choice” during a ceremony in Manhattan, at the Villa Albertine of the French Embassy, chaired by Anne Berest, laureate in 2022 and surrounded by students from eight universities (Columbia, Duke, Harvard, MIT, New York University, Princeton, University of Virginia and Yale).
These young bilingual women, mostly American, French and other nationalities, studied for months in French six books from the Goncourt 2022 selection won in November by the Frenchwoman Brigitte Giraud with Vivre vite (Flammarion).
The jury of these young literary scholars therefore awarded his Goncourt in an American version to A Human Sum (Rivages) by the Haitian novelist and poet Makenzy Orcel, which speaks from beyond the grave on 600 pages, in an abundant and uninterrupted language, a woman inhabited by poetry and violence. They had to eliminate in particular the very personal Vivre vite by Brigitte Giraud and the historical and political stories Le mage du Kremlin (Gallimard) by the Italian-Swiss Giuliano da Empoli and Les almost sisters (Seuil) by Cloé Korman.
When Anne Berest announced the prize, Makenzy Orcel made a surprise and highly acclaimed appearance at the Villa Albertine. “I don’t write for awards, not for recognition, I write because it matters; because literature is an invitation to look at the world differently, to approach it differently, to show the foundations of the world”, launched the writer born in 1983 in Port-au-Prince, already rewarded in France and whose first novel Les Immortelles in 2012 was noticed for the profusion of his writing.
The “unanimous” student jury praised “such delightful and poetic prose (…) a magnificent literary work (…) pure fiction that speaks of universalism” and compared them to the works of Americans William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. “It shows that fiction can be the best way to get to the truth,” said Arielle Stern of Duke University in North Carolina. For her part, Anne Berest, whose family novel on the Holocaust La Carte postale was translated in the United States in May (The Postcard Europa Éditions) said she was “convinced that literature is a gateway to understanding the History”.
