The novelist and academician François Weyergans, winner of the Renaudot and Goncourt prize, died Monday at the age of 77, announced the Académie française. "The Perpetual Secretary and the members of the French Academy have the sadness to report the disappearance of their colleague François Weyergans died May 27, 2019 in Paris," said the French Academy in a statement.
Born in Brussels on August 2nd, 1941, François Weyergans was one of the rare writers to have received both the Renaudot prize (for The boxer's dementia in 1992) and the Goncourt prize (for Trois jours chez ma mère in 2005). A facetious and unclassifiable writer, he was elected to the Académie Française in March 2009, chairing Alain Robbe-Grillet. In addition to his activities as a novelist, François Weyergans loved cinema and dance. His literary work includes about fifteen titles, among them The Life of a Baby, whose hero is a child in the belly of his mother.
A passionate film novelist
François Weyergans was the son of the Belgian Christian-inspired writer Franz Weyergans. He lived mainly in France, only returning to his native Belgium for his studies at the Saint-Boniface-Parnasse Institute, which was also Hergé's high school. From his family origins, Weyergans recognized a double source of inspiration: Tintin and the Gospels. Passionate about cinema, he entered the early 1960s at the Institute of Higher Film Studies (Idhec, became the Fémis) and made several films on Maurice Béjart, his friend he will accompany until his last breath in 2007 .
His feature film, A film about someone, was selected in 1972 at the Venice Film Festival. Noticed since his first book, The Clown , Prix Roger Nimier 1973, a story of psychoanalyst, he devoted himself to literature, sometimes with long moments of doubt and silence. "The critics keep calling me a clown, I like that (...) but I'm a clown with a message," he said in 1989 after a book called I'm a writer .