The Marseille novelist Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, 56, won the Prix Médicis on Tuesday, November 8. Her novel “The Thirteenth Hour” tells the story of a teenager, Farah, daughter of the founder of the Church of the Thirteenth Hour, a community as feminist as queer and animalist. The Medici prize for a foreign novel was awarded to the Ukrainian writer Andrei Kurkov for “Les abeilles grises” (Liana Levi editions), the Médicis prize for essays went to the philosopher Georges Didi-Uberman for “The witness to the end” ( Midnight).
The Thirteenth Hour is a dive into a very particular millennial community. Raised alone by her father, founder of the Church of the Thirteenth Hour, Farah is surrounded by women and men who are particularly fragile and frightened by a world that is going badly. A community of susceptible and vulnerable seeking to fight the apocalypse by reciting Rimbaud, celebrating poetic masses and inflicting psychic deworming treatments.
Born in 1966 in Marseille under the name of Emmanuelle Garino, Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam now lives in Villejuif, near Paris. The laureate is agrégé in modern letters and is committed, until 2017, as an editor at the Contre-Pieds editions. The Thirteenth Hour is his twelfth novel and his second major literary award, after the Inter Book Prize in 2018 for his novel Arcadia. Passionate about theatre, author of noir novels under the pseudonym of Rebecca Lighieri, she also chose a “pseudonym” as a literary novelist, behind Bayamack-Tam hides the surname of her first husband and father of her two daughters.
The ambitions of the Prix Médicis
Founded in 1958, the Prix Médicis aims to crown a novel, a story and a collection of short stories by an author who is relatively new or not yet recognized as such. Considered the most literary prize among the grand prizes of the fall, the Medici thus gives itself a very wide niche which allows both to distinguish in 2021 an already multi-award-winning Christine Angot, without having won the Goncourt prize or the Renaudot prize. , or, in 2020, a Chloé Delaume, twenty years after receiving the December prize.
This year, the choice of the jury obviously focused on the authors. For the final selection, he kept the books of seven women and one man, The dancing man, by Victor Jestin. A method that contrasts with the fact that among the ten members of the jury are only three women, including Marie-Darrieussecq, herself winner of the prize in 2013, and seven men, including Andreï Makine, Goncourt prize in 1995.