Favorite part, Neige Sinno, 46 years old, won the Femina 2023 prize with her writing on incest suffered when she was a child. After having already enthused 80,000 readers, the novelist, who lives and teaches in Mexico, appears with her novel “Triste tigre” also in the latest list of the Goncourt prize which will be announced tomorrow, Tuesday November 7.
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The Femina Foreign Prize was awarded by the exclusively female jury this Monday, November 6 to Louise Erdrich for Sentence, translated from the American by Sarah Gurcel. It is the story of a Native American bookseller confronted with the ghosts of the past and the racism of the present. And it was Hugo Micheron who won the Femina Essay for Anger and Forgetting (Gallimard). This specialist in jihadism looks at radical and violent Islamist movements in Europe after the collapse of the Islamic State organization in Syria.
“ He said he loved me. He said that it was to be able to express this love that he did what he did to me… » So begins sad tiger. Destiny was visibly very special with Neige Sinno, born on May 22, 1977 in Vars, in the Hautes-Alpes, in France. She had sent the 288 pages of the manuscript of her book by post to POL editions. And instead of ticking the boxes of the perfect novel, she oscillates between story and autopsy, and succeeds in touching the hearts of readers. His story disturbs, impresses, upsets.
Radical honesty
It is the confession of a story long buried in this very modest family. Her parents separate, her mother has a new partner. Neige is 6 years old, her stepfather is 24 years old. She refuses to call him dad. It imposes itself differently. The incest will last eight years. The transformation of the nightmare into literature will be a kind of rebellion, an act of reflection, courage… and trust in the reader, constructed in the text with radical honesty. “ The subject that my book deals with is not a subject for women, nor for men, nor for others. », declared Neige Sinno after the announcement of the prize, at the Carnavalet museum in Paris.
At the age of 20, Neige Sinno filed a complaint and had her stepfather sentenced to nine years in prison. Literature offers itself to her as a possible outcome, without aestheticizing violence. After defending a thesis on English literature, she then studied in the United States and Mexico. She has lived there since 2006, in the state of Michoacán, in a village west of Mexico, as a university student and translator.
After The Life of Ratsa collection of short stories published by La Tangente in 2007, she published her first novel in 2018, The truck, published by Christophe Lucquin. Thanks to Sad Tigershe won her first major literary prize with the Femina Prize.