Writer Henri Coulonges, winner of the 1979 French Academy Grand Prix du Novel for Farewell to the Wild Woman, died on May 4 at the age of 86, one of his two sons announced on Monday . Born in Deauville (Calvados) under the name of Marc-Antoine de Dampierre, this painter passionate about art distinguished himself mainly through his pen in the 1970s and 1980s.
Collaborator of the magazine Savoir des Arts, he published his first novel, Les rives de l’Irrawaddy, with Fayard in 1975, focusing on the anti-Nazi resistance in German student circles during the Second World War. His greatest critical and commercial success came four years later with L’adieu à la femme sauvage (Stock), which also earned him the RTL general public prize. Translated into fifteen languages, the book describes the German debacle through the wanderings of a 12-year-old girl fleeing Dresden in 1945 with her mother in a state of shock.
Will follow, still with Stock, At the approach of an evening in the world (1983) on a young Irishwoman between Kashmir and the Emerald Isle during the First World War, The Morave Brothers (1986), awarded the prize of the Four Juries, The Letter to Kirilenko (1989), crowned with the Chateaubriand Prize, then, at Grasset, The Hungarian March (1992), Passage of the comet (1996) and Six gray geese (2001).
In 1997, Henri Coulonges narrowly missed being elected to the French Academy against journalist Jean-François Revel. He will not represent himself again, relates his son Henri de Dampierre. His father, a painter exhibited under his real name, notably in the Parisian gallery Denise René, was “not interested in honors”, he explains. Translated into 17 languages, Henri Coulonges’ novels have been published in the “Le Livre de Poche” collection, the Farewell to the Wild Woman edition remaining available in bookstores, underlines Henri de Dampierre.
