Winner of the 2023 Interallié Prize and the Jean Giono Prize, finalist of the Goncourt and Renaudot Prizes, the philosopher and essayist Gaspard Koenig will have marked this literary season. His novel “Humus” evokes the crossed destinies of two young agronomists who are completely opposed to each other. Two courses around the importance of earthworms in the balance of the earth, an agricultural adventure for one and an industrial adventure for the other.
Gaspard Koenig is one of the rare true French liberals. This great admirer of Montaigne even for a time cherished the hope of running for the presidential election. But it is in books, economics, philosophy but also in novels that this Normalien made his name.
This year he is one of the multi-award winning novelists of the literary season. If the Goncourt and the Renaudot escaped him -probably narrowly-, his latest novel received the Jean Giono prize and the Interallié Prize. Nearly 400 fascinating pages, imbued with biting and stimulating irony.
An ecological epic that takes us from the Saclay plateau to Silicon Valley – via the Normandy countryside -, with those who get their hands dirty with earth and those who are content with phosphorus. Ecology, entrepreneurship, marketing, capitalism, sex, social benefits, social advancement, Gaspard Koenig is putting an entire Western society through the mill. It is sometimes funny, often fierce, often also uplifting, and therefore human.
“ Humus » is published by Éditions de l’Observatoire. Gaspard Koenig is the guest of VMDN.
Reporting : Blick Bassy is one of his country’s most prolific artists. Musician, singer, writer, since the spring he has also been the co-director of the memory commission on France’s colonial past in Cameroon set up by Emmanuel Macron. Blick Bassy is currently in Berlin where his show “Bikutsi” is being performed at the Humboldt forum, initially created in Paris and which has since spread across the world. Pascal Thibaut met him for VMDN.