This year, the jury is made up of Jean-Luc Barré, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Julie Couturier, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, Chems-eddine Hafiz (President), Pierre Leroy, Aïcha Mokdahi, Jean Mouttapa, Amélie Petit , Jean-Robert Pitte, Philippe Robinet and Benjamin Stora. The prize was awarded, for the year 2022, on December 8, to:
In the “Novel” category (in the second ballot) to Xavier Le Clerc for An untitled man published by Gallimard
” If you were so attached to your worker’s card, it’s probably because you were a man without a title. You who were born dispossessed of all titles of ownership and citizenship, you will only have known titles of transport and residence. The title in Latin means the inscription. And if you were well registered somewhere in very small, it was unfortunately only to erase you. You figured on the endless list of men to be crushed at work, like so many others before you to mix in the trenches. »
While reading Misery of Kabylie, a report published by Camus in 1939, Xavier Le Clerc discovers the conditions of destitution in which his father grew up. The author retraces the career of this courageous man, so long absent and mute, who arrived from Algeria in 1962, hired as a laborer at the Société Métallurgique de Normandie. This captivating testimony is a cry of revolt against injustice and organized misery, but it also lets us hear a peaceful voice that invites us to reflect on the notions of identity and integration.
Xavier Le Clerc was born in Algeria in 1979, he lives and works in Paris. He published a first novel, Thanks, under his first name, Hamid Aït-Taleb. Her second novel, one hundred and twenty francsevoked the figure of his Kabyle great-grandfather, who died for France in Verdun in 1917.
In the category “Essay on Muslim civilization” (in the third round of voting) to Karima Berger for The Keepers of the Secret published by Albin Michel.
“ Women are the secret keepers of what God keeps secret says the Quran in one of its enigmatic verses.
At a time when the injunction of “virtue” or that of “liberation” is trying to impose itself on Muslim women, Karima Berger deploys here her thought of the feminine, a political, spiritual and poetic thought. By lifting the veil of appearances, she discovers the intelligence of women which is at work and which radiates the whole body of Islam. The heroines of the tradition (Layla, Hagar, Aïcha, Khadîdja, Fâtima, Marie…) give flesh to thought, to speech, to beauty. They thus deploy all the degrees of this “secret” of which women are the Guardians.
Combining her life and her culture as a woman from the East and the West, Karima Berger extends in these Guardians of the Secret the research she had undertaken with Etty Hillesum in Les Attentives (Albin Michel, 2019).
Karima Berger was born in Algeria, she has lived in France for more than thirty years and is the author of several books, including, with Albin Michel: Shards of Islam (essay, 2009), The Attentions (essay, 2014) and Mektouba (novel, 2016). His latest book is The Essay Hegira (Actes Sud, 2017).
From 2014 to 2017, Karima Berger chaired the Association of Believers’ Writers (created by André Chouraqui), to which she gave new impetus, and which she renamed “Writing and Spirituality”.
DOSSIER – Albums, novels: a selection of 20 children’s books for Christmas 2020
The literary prize of the Great Mosque of Paris announces its winners