The Franz Hessel Prize
Franz Hessel Prize 2011
Thomas Melle (Sickster, Rowohlt, 2011) and
Céline Minard (So long, Luise, Denoël, 2011)
Winners of the 2011 Franz Hessel Prize
Céline Minard (So long, Luise, Denoël, 2011)
Winners of the 2011 Franz Hessel Prize
Crédit photo : David Ignaszewski
The award ceremony took place on December 8, 2011 in Paris, in the presence of Bernd Neumann, Minister of State at the German Chancellery and Representative of the Federal Government for Culture and the Media, and Frédéric Mitterrand, French Minister for Culture and Communication.
The authors
Thomas Melle was born in Bonn in 1975 and lives in Berlin. He studied comparative literature and philosophy in Tübingen, Austin (Texas), and Berlin. He translated William T. Vollmann, published several plays and a collection of short stories, Raumforderung. In his first novel, Sickster (Rowohlt-Berlin, 2011), he explores the madness of today’s Berlin and introduces his readers to a nightlife in which sex, alcohol, and drugs play an important part. Written in a condensed and analytical style, Sickster is a brilliant and disturbing portrait of our time.
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Born in 1969, Céline Minard studied philosophy before becoming a full-time writer. She is the author of several novels and stories, and she was writer-in-residence at the Villa Médicis in 2007 and 2008, and at the Villa Kujoyama in 2011. Her novel Bastard Battle (Léo Scheer, 2008) obtained a special mention from the Prix Wepler - Fondation La Poste. In 2011 she published Les Ales (Cambourakis), in collaboration with the visual artist Scomparo, as well as So long, Luise (Denoël): an aging novelist writes her will and takes pleasure in blurring, one more time, the boundaries between reality and fiction. Part fairy tale, part Western, and part memoir, filled with fantastic creatures of all kinds, this will opens up a vast number of galleries and echo chambers where the sound of a life already lived can be heard, a life that the writing replays and reactivates.“From one book to the next – each unique, startling, and powerful – the voice of Cécile Minard (La Manadologie, Le Dernier Monde, Bastard Battle…) can be heard loud and clear: a glorious, lively, and ironic voice capable of the most astonishing transformations. It is through the magic of language that the diverse and baroque characters that the novelist summons emerge – it is through the magic of language that they come to life, rise from the flat surface of the page, speak up and address the audience, like actors on a stage: (…) a long, strange, sensuous, and wonderfully chaotic monologue where thousands of echoes – Lewis Carroll and Nabokov, old fairy tales, the English language and Villon’s French – can be heard cascading, to create a rich, magnificent, and very skillful sound fabric.”
Nathalie Crom, Télérama
Bibliography
So Long, Luise (Denoël, 2011)
Les Ales, dessins de Scomparo (Cambourakis, 2011)
Olimpia (Denoël, 2010)
Bastard battle (Leo Scheer, 2008)
Le dernier monde (Denoël, 2007 ; Gallimard, coll. « Folio », 2009)
La manadologie (Musica Falsa, coll. « Frictions », 2005)
R. (Act Mem, 2004)
The panel
The french panel
Nils C. Ahl (journaliste et critique littéraire), Francesca Isidori (journaliste et critique littéraire), Christine de Mazières (déléguée générale du Syndicat National de l’Edition), Augustin Trapenard (journaliste et critique littéraire) et Guy Walter (directeur de la Villa Gillet, co-directeur des Subsistances).
The german panel
Hatice Akyün (journaliste et écrivain), Thorsten Dönges (responsable de la programmation au Literarisches Colloquium Berlin), Hans-Peter Kunisch (journaliste et écrivain), Petra Metz (critique littéraire) et Ulrike Vedder (professeur à l’Université Humboldt de Berlin).
Links
Editions Denoël
Editions Léo Scheer
Editions Cambourakis
Fondation Genshagen
Contact
Charlotte Stolz
Stiftung Genshagen,phone number. 03378 – 805959, stolz@stiftung-genshagen.de
Céline Linguagrossa
Villa Gillet, phone number : +33 (0)4 78 27 02 48, c.linguagrossa@villagillet.net