"Chavirer" by Lola Lafon, 2020 winner of Choix Goncourt de la Suisse

Pierre Assouline interviews the jury during the ceremony at the Résidence de France in Bern in 2019
Pierre Assouline interviews the jury during the ceremony at the Résidence de France in Bern in 2019
Edmond de Goncourt (source: Wikimedia Commons)
Edmond de Goncourt (source: Wikimedia Commons)

Institutional Communication Service

30 November 2020

The novel "Chavirer" by Lola Lafon published by Actes Sud won the 2020 edition of Choix Goncourt de la Suisse. The jury, made up of students from seven Swiss universities, including the students of USI professor Regina Bollhalder Mayer's sectorial French course, announced the winner's name on Thursday during an online ceremony.

"I am glad that Chavirer won the award because she was my first choice right from the start," said USI student Diana Sofia da Costa Santos. "Bold without being irreverent, popular without being vulgar, this novel soberly describes a dramatic situation," said Matthieu Augsburger and Julie Munch, students at the University of Basel.

The Choix Goncourt de la Suisse award is a literary prize promoted by the French Embassy in Bern in collaboration with Università della Svizzera italiana, those of Basel, Bern, Freiburg, Neuchâtel, and Zurich, as well as the ETH Zürich, and aims to promote French-language literature and to spread the pleasure of both critical and disinterested reading of contemporary works. It is the Swiss appendix to the famous French literary prize awarded by the Académie Goncourt, the "société littéraire" initiated by the writer Edmond de Goncourt, one of the leading figures - together with his brother Jules - on the French cultural scene in the second half of the 19th century, a friend of authors such as Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant.

 

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Click here for the video-proclamation by the students of the winning novel

More information about the Choix Goncourt de la Suisse award

More information about the Prix Goncourt

 

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