Novelist NDiaye wins France's top literary prize
Last Updated: Monday, November 2, 2009 | 9:26 AM ET
CBC News
French-born writer Marie NDiaye won the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize, on Monday for Three Strong Women, her moving tale of the struggles of women in Europe and Africa.
NDiaye has written a dozen books, from novels to short story collections and plays, and in 2001 she won the Prix Femina. She was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, south of Paris, to a French mother and a Senegalese father.
Her latest novel, Trois puissantes femmes, is the story of characters Norah, Fanta and Khadi and their fight to "preserve their dignity in the face of humiliations that life has inflicted," according to publisher Gallimard.
Norah is a French lawyer with roots in West Africa; Fanta is a Senegalese woman living in France; and Khadi is a young Senegalese woman who tries to immigrate illegally to Europe.
"They are in very difficult situations," NDiaye said in an interview with the Mediapart newspaper. "[But] they have a hard inner core that is absolutely unbreakable."
In accordance with tradition, the annual prize was announced at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, where the Goncourt jury meets each year to select the book it deems to be the best new work in French literature.
Although the prize comes with a nominal purse, the 105-year-old Prix Goncourt guarantees literary acclaim and high sales for the winning author. Past recipients include Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras.
Last year, exiled Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi won the Goncourt prize for Syngue Sabour, a novel about the misery of a woman caring for a husband left brain-damaged by a war wound.
