François-Henri Désrable wins, at age 34, the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française 2021

François-Henri Désrables, winner of the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française 2021 for “My master and my winner” (Gallimard), here in 2017. AFP - JOEL SAGET

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

3 min

The prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française was won this Thursday, October 28 by the French writer François-Henri Désrable.

"My master and my winner", published by Gallimard editions, tells in a very subtle, poetic and humorous way the story of a love ending badly.

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The immortals under the Cupola of the French Academy crowned a book whose title proudly bears a line from the poem " 

 " by Paul Verlaine: " 

 " .

On 192 pages, it unfolds the melodrama of a love as passionate as it is illegitimate around Tina, Edgar and his best friend, Vasco.

François-Henri Désrable particularly appealed to academics with his classic style playing with literary references and humor.

“ 

Belle du seigneur

”remarked the winner after the award was announced.

An author already translated into ten languages

Despite his young age, Désrable is no longer a stranger in the literary world.

The novelist's previous work,

 had succeeded in being selected for both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Renaudot.

Today, his novels are translated into ten languages.

From the start, his literary efforts were crowned with success.

In 2012, at the age of 21, he won the Young French Writer Prize for his short story on Danton's death.

The following year, the Académie française encouraged him with the Prix Amic, a prize for supporting literary creation, for

.

And his biography fictionalized on a mathematical prodigy who died in a duel, Évariste, he won the Biography Prize in 2015.

Grandson of a Venetian gondolier

A romantic side also runs through the personal history of the novelist, grandson of a Venetian gondolier, a city where the writer lives regularly. Born in 1987 in Amiens where he was, like President Emmanuel Macron, a high school student at the private establishment La Providence, he spent part of his youth in a high school in Minnesota, in the United States, and first continued in as a professional player his father's ice hockey tradition. After studying law, he abandoned his thesis to fully invest in literature.

François-Henri Désrable won the Grand Prix, endowed with 10,000 euros, with great accuracy, in the third round of the ballot, with one more vote than for

 Gilles Martin-Chauffier's

(Grasset) and also dismissing the Senegalese Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and his novel 

(Philippe Rey) which remains in the running for the Goncourt and Renaudot awards, the announcement of which is expected on November 3.

The very French history of the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française

This annual French Academy award was created in 1914 and first awarded in 1915. It has only been awarded three times to authors of African origin.

In 2015, the Franco-Tunisian writers Hédi Kaddour (

) and Algerian Boualem Sansal (

) won it

.

And in 1996, the Franco-Cameroonian Calixthe Beyala (

) became the first laureate from black Africa celebrated as the author of the novel deemed the best of the year by the French Academy.

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