The Goncourt to an Afghan, the Renaudot to a Guinean

by Pierre Joris · November 11, 2008

Below, the Guardian’s article on the winners of France’s two most prestigious prizes, which this year go to two francophone writers: Atiq Rahimi, originally from Afghanistan, and Tierno Monénembo from Guinea. It is also the first Goncourt that goes to P.O.L. the most adventurous and avant-garde Paris publisher of the last 25 years (most years it is one of three big publishers, Gallimard, Grasset or Le Seuil who garner the prize, which has often given rise to rumors of more or less rigged juries).

In an interview, Atiq Rahmini, who got the Goncourt for Syngué sabour (The Patience Stone — an Iranian title) his fourth novel, the first he has written in French, said: “What a pleasure to write in an other language!” A feeling I share very deeply.

Richard Lea

guardian.co.uk, Monday November 10 2008 15.47 GMT

Article history

In the year when the literary world turned to France, with the award of the Nobel prize for literature to JMG le Clézio, Paris has returned the compliment, awarding two of the biggest prizes of the French literary calendar to writers born in Afghanistan and Guinea.

Atiq Rahimi has won the 2008 Goncourt prize with his fourth novel, Syngué sabour (Patience Stone), his first to be written directly in French rather than the Persian he spoke during his childhood in Afghanistan, while the Prix Renaudot has been taken by Tierno Monénembo for Le roi de Kahel (The King of Kahel).

Born in 1962, Rahimi was forced from Kabul in 1984, finding political asylum in Paris where he worked as a film-maker. His film version of his first novel, Earth and Ashes, won the Regard sur l’avenir prize at the 2004 Cannes festival.

His latest novel returns to Afghanistan, where a woman nurses her husband, a mujahideen fighter who has been paralysed by a bullet in the neck. Rahimi’s stripped-down prose takes the form of a monologue which gradually reveals more of the unnamed woman’s suffering as she becomes convinced her husband can hear what she is saying.

The Guinean novelist Tierno Monénembo, born in 1947, fled the dictatorship of Sékou Touré in 1969, travelling on foot to reach Senegal. He arrived in France in 1973, and published his first novel in 1979.

Much of his work deals with wandering and exile, with his 10th, Le roi de Kahel, no exception. It follows the life of the 19th-century French adventurer, Aimé Victor Olivier, as he travels in search of the Fula people with the motto “les connaitre plutôt que les combattre” – to get to know them, rather than to fight them.

Neither the Renaudot nor the Goncourt comes with a hefty cheque – the Renaudot offers no prize money at all, while the Goncourt winner takes home 10 euros – but both authors can expect their sales to be transformed, with winners of both prizes typically selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This year, however, Rahimi and Monénembo can expect stiff competition on the shelves from Ritournelle de la Faim (Hungry Ritornello), the latest novel from one JMG Clézio.

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Pierre Joris, born in Strasbourg, France in 1946, was raised in Luxembourg. Since age 18, he has moved between Europe, the Maghreb & the US & holds both Luxembourg & American citizenship. He has published over 80 books of poetry, essays, translations & anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021) & Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones (Posthumous prose, from CMP) & The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG). Forthcoming are: Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” (Small Orange Import, 2023) & Diwan of Exiles: A Pierre Joris Reader (edited with Ariel Reznikoff, 2024). For a full list see the right column on this blog.

In 2011 Litteraria Pragensia, Charles University, Prague, published Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-between, edited by Peter Cockelbergh, with essays on Joris’ work by, among others, Mohammed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Robert Kelly, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jennifer Moxley, Jean Portante, Carrie Noland, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff & Nicole Peyrafitte (2011).

Other work includes the CD Routes, not Roots (with Munir Beken, oud; Mike Bisio, bass; Ben Chadabe, percussion; Mitch Elrod, guitar; Ta’wil Productions). With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry, and with Habib. Tengour Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3: The University of California Book of North African Literature.

When not on the road, he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with his wife, multimedia praticienne Nicole Peyrafitte. A volume of their collaborative work, to be called Domopoetics, will be published in the near future.