BRIGITTE GIRAUD. This Thursday, November 3, Brigitte Giraud became the 13th French woman to win the Goncourt prize, at the age of 56, for her book “Live fast”, in which she pays tribute to her deceased husband.
[Mis à jour le 4 novembre 2022 à 11h23] Brigitte Giraud became, this Thursday, November 3, 2022, the 13th woman to win the Goncourt prize, for her book live fast. She succeeds Mohamed Mbougar Sarr on the list of winners, and is the first award-winning novelist since 2016, the year when Leïla Slimani won the prize with Soft song.
In her book, the 56-year-old writer wanted to pay tribute to her husband, Claude, who died following a motorcycle accident on June 22, 1999, a “disaster”, she writes in her book. The novelist had already written about this “drama” in 2001. In Now, she recounted the weeks following the accident, “the book of amazement, the explosion, the crash just after”. For live fastshe declares: “I knew for a long time that I had to write the book. The book which lives up to Claude, of our love story, the one which embraces all that and which seeks the truth, truths.”
The jury went to the end of the fourteen statutory rounds to elect Brigitte Giraud. Didier Decoin, president of the Goncourt Academy, indicates that Brigitte Giraud “started from a cruel mourning that she felt, which is poignant” to write a book that has “something tragic”. And to add that she “poses with great simplicity and authenticity the question of destiny”. While she has become the thirteenth novelist to obtain the prize since the creation of the Goncourt, she declares: “It is not as a woman that I receive the prize, but as a person who has been working in literature for years. .”
For Brigitte Giraud, being awarded the Goncourt is a long-awaited coronation after 14 published works ranging from novels to stories through collections of short stories, because the author knows how to play her art in several styles. The 56-year-old Lyonnaise was however able to have a foretaste of this award in 2007, when her short story entitled Love is very overrated received the Goncourt prize for short stories, and two later when the 2009 Jean-Giono jury prize was awarded to his book Un foreign year. The fact remains that in 2022, Brigitte Giraud is rewarded for a very personal work whose emotion has overwhelmed readers. By receiving the Goncourt prize this Thursday between the walls of the Drouant restaurant in the heart of the Opéra district in Paris, as tradition dictates, the writer is rewarded with a check for 10 euros but ensures colossal sales of his latest novel.
live fast, the 208-page story published by Flammarion in 2022 and written by Brigitte Giraud, is inspired by the story of the writer and a tragic moment, the death of her husband who died at age 41 in a motorcycle accident. in 1999. The book follows the thread of a countdown before this disappearance and retraces the journey of a couple in love and in love with the arts between literature and music while drawing the portrait of Claude, guitarist and rock critic. The writer Brigitte Giraud opens up in this novel by evoking the project that the couple, parent of an 8-year-old boy, Theo, had to afford a house on the hills of Lyon after twenty years of living together. The emotion felt by the reader browsing the pages of live fast is indisputable since he attaches himself to this family before having to suffer from the disappearance of the main character, who also played the leading role in the life of Brigitte Giraud.
The author took more than 20 years after the loss of her companion to write this book which she dedicates to her son. Yet in 2001, his book To here lingered over the days following the accident and up to Claude’s burial. In the end, it is all of Brigitte Giraud’s work that takes on a little of her life on each page.
Brigitte Giraud was born in 1960 in Sidi-bel-Abbès in Algeria, and is currently based in Lyon, according to information from the site confluences.org. She has always been very attached to literature, having been a bookseller but also a translator and journalist. Her first novel, Parents’ room, was published in 1997. Two years later, her life was turned upside down when her husband, Claude, fell to his death after driving too fast after a red light, on an overpowered motorcycle that did not belong to him. . Information reported by franceinfo. At that time, she was 36 years old. The couple had just bought a house in Caluire-et-Cuire near Lyon, and she therefore moved there without her companion with her very young son. It was only recently, when it was decided to sell this house, that the author wanted to write this story, which has now been awarded the Goncourt. During her literary career, Brigitte Giraud wrote 14 novels, essays, stories and short stories.