Literary Awards: Freud Roudinesco takes all – Le Point

The award literary prizes is a UFO. A reward or without allocation ceremony each fall in four years, a novel crown among the eight major literary prizes of school. This year is the high priestess of psychoanalysis, Elizabeth Roudinesco, Prices December, who wins, hands down, as explained Pierre Leroy, founder of the prize, mastermind of the Lagardère Group, bibliophile and collector Sade: “In the first round, everyone had written the name Roudinesco top three favorites.”

Problem, Sigmund Freud, in his time and in ours , the book of Roudisneco, is not a novel, but a biography. The book, translated into 25 languages, among the 25 best books of the year of Point , is certainly the first biography of the father of psychoanalysis from Freud. A vi e, Peter Gay (Fayard) in 1991, but it is impossible to label other than social sciences. But can you drag a bio among literary novels? And how, then, do we flip to the other side of the mirror?

Pierre Leroy explained that indeed “a discussion in principle on the genre of the book took place.” The man willingly tells the protocol, kitchen hand, the jury jury that rubs the cream of books. The former minister Christine Albanel, Bompart Alexander, president of the Fnac, Nicolas Demorand, Marie Drucker, Pierre Lescure and Olivier Poivre d’Arvor among others, read the Flora, the Renaudot, the Goncourt, the Interallié the Medici Femina and in December a few weeks. You have to go fast.

Real players

The price December, that raises questions, already the clear favorite: “I myself read like a novel, this is it must be concluded, and there was no way for us to exclude it. ” On 16 December, the dinner was attended by the “friendly set of eleven personalities involved in cultural activity” (the jury) selected by Pierre Leroy, for the past deliberations. “These are real players, with plugs. They opinions, ripen, confront them,” he says again. Two laps later, by secret ballot, elbow to elbow with the Prix Goncourt Lydie Salvayre for No cry (Threshold), Roudinesco wins.

What really weighed in the balance, says the president, it is not as “Freud’s personality – it could have been someone else – but the that life brings many elements worthy of inclusion in a novel! ” Undeniably, Freud is quite a character.