And the Literature Albertine Prize 2020 goes to ….

The Albertine Prize 2020, awarded by the cultural services of the French Embassy and supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, rewards the favorite work of American readers of contemporary French-speaking fiction which has been translated into English and published in the United States in the previous calendar year.

The 2020 Albertine Prize was awarded on December 9, 2020, to Muslim, a novel by Zahia Rhamani.

• Muslim, a novel (Musulman) – Zahia Rahmani – Locked in a camp simply because of her Muslim origins, the narrator remembers. As a child, she was marked by the abandonment of her mother tongue, Berber, which she spoke in Algeria where she was born. The French school gave him the keys to another world and a new language. Later, she will have to learn to live with another violence: the denial of the diversity of the one who is drowned under the generic figure of the “Muslim”. This woman, now an adult, suffocates.

Here are the books that were in competition and that could fill Santa Claus socks and more:

• Animalia (Règne Animal) – Jean Baptiste Del Amo – Règne animal traces, from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century, the history of a family farm destined to become a pig farm. In this environment dominated by the omnipresence of animals, five generations go through the cataclysm of war, economic disasters
• Vernon Subutex – Virginie Despentes & Luz: A synesthetic fusion of music, drawing and words, Vernon Subutex is a four-handed masterpiece by the most rock duo in comic book literature.
• Kannjawou – Lyonel Trouillot – Five young people on the verge of adulthood dream in vain of the future in the miserable district of the “rue de l’Enterrement”, near the large cemetery where even the dead must fight to find a place.
• Hold Fast your Crown (Tiens ferme ta couronne) – Yannick Haenel – Jean wrote a huge script about Melville’s life, that only Michael Cimino, the cursed director of the movie “The Deer Hunter”, could achieve. While trying to meet him, Jean embarks on a hallucinatory quest: that of the truth which would sparkle between cinema and literature. Follows a series of adventures as funny as they are flamboyant between Paris, New York, Colmar and a lake in Italy.

And for those who missed it, here is the list of novels that were in competition in 2019.

Happy reading