The Académie des lettres du Québec has awarded its four literary prizes

The Académie des lettres du Québec awarded its four literary prizes on Tuesday evening, honoring the novel, poetry, essay and Quebec theater. The prices of the Académie des lettres du Québec are endowed with 1,500 Canadian dollars (approximately 1,000 euros). The winners receive a work by Rober Racine and a membership in the Center québécois du PEN international.

the Ringuet price, which rewards a Quebec novel, was awarded to the author Ying Chen, for his novel Radiation, appeared at Leméac, in October 2020. In her book, she tells the story of an illustrious woman of science through the voice of her daughter, who at eighteen became her assistant on the battlefields and, subsequently, in her laboratory . We thus think of Marie Curie and her daughter Irene in this remembrance from beyond the grave which brings to life the destiny of these two scientists as well as other equally illustrious members of this family, their hazards in history and also their fights. With one of his previous works, Ingratitude (Leméac), the novelist was a finalist for several prestigious literary prizes (Governor General’s prize, Femina prize). She received the Quebec-Paris Prize, the Elle-Quebec Prize and the Quebec Booksellers Prize

the Alain-Grandbois prize (poetry) was awarded to Tania Langlais for the collection of poetry While Perceval was falling (Les Herbes Rouges). “In these obstinate poems, Tania Langlais distributes the verses like the cards of a tarot. A story takes shape according to their arrangements. This story is that of Virginia Woolf’s last day, “the most beautiful suicide / in English literature”; that of Perceval, the silent dead man from his novel The Waves; and it is also something else, a tenacious suffering which is revealed only in bursts“explains the publisher. The author won the Émile-Nelligan prize for her first book, Twelve beasts in human shirts (Red herbs).

the Marcel-Dubé Prize of the theater crowned the director Olivier Choiniere for Zoe (Workshop 10). In the play, college students called an indefinite general strike. Zoe refuses to join the movement: she is convinced that the best way for her to contribute to society is to continue her studies with a view to entering medicine. She obtained an injunction from the Court obliging her teachers to teach her, on pain of imprisonment. It is therefore under duress that Luc, her professor of philosophy, begins a dialogue with her that will force them both to reconsider their relationship to each other, and to test the limits of their freedom. Olivier Choinière is the author and general and artistic co-director of the creation company L’acte. He notably won the Prix de la Association québécoise des critiques de théâtre, the Michel-Tremblay award and the Siminovitch award.

Finally, the Victor-Barbeau Prize has been delivered to Dalie Giroux for the test The eye of the master. Figures of the Quebec colonial imagination (Inkwell memory). The essay questions the myth of the master at home who defines the sovereignist struggles in Quebec, the relationship to the territory and to the First Nations. Against conquest, domination, surveillance, Dalie Giroux claims another idea of ​​independence, in opposition to the founding violence of the state. It evokes the missed rendezvous with a decolonial past-future of Quebec and the possibility of a chain of solidarities that would mobilize the living forces of indigenous thought, anti-racist, ecological and feminist struggles in order to inhabit the territory together.