Mabanckou, who won last year’s Renaudot prize for “Mémoires du Porc-épic” (“Memoirs of a Porcupine”), and who now teaches French literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. “When French literature goes beyond its own borders, it self- destructs because it is only read on the banks of the Seine,” noted Mr. Their endorsement of francophone fiction implied recognition that, since the postwar Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, French literature has cut itself off from the world with its navel-gazing obsession with text over narrative. Ben Jelloun and Dai Sijie of China, already enjoy a strong following in France.īut it was no less significant that several prominent French writers, among them Jean Rouaud, Erik Orsenna and J. Some signatories are veteran advocates of such writing, notably Michel Le Bris, the driving force behind the manifesto, who runs the annual festival Étonnants-Voyageurs, or Astonishing Travelers, at Saint Malo in Brittany. Yet the 2006 harvest by non-French writers was the catalyst for the manifesto promoting “littérature-monde.” The Moroccan-born Tahar Ben Jelloun, Lebanon’s Amin Maalouf and Russia’s Andreï Makine have all won Goncourts. They were not the first francophone writers to win a major French book award. Other winners were Alain Mabanckou from Congo, Nancy Huston from Canada and Léonora Miano from Cameroon. Last fall, to the astonishment of France’s literary establishment, foreign-born writers won five of the country’s seven major book awards, with the coveted Goncourt going to “Les Bienveillantes” (“The Kindly Ones”) by the New York-born novelist Jonathan Littell, who also won the Académie Française’s prize. Still, the timing of this new campaign in not accidental. ![]() Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ben Okri, Arundhati Roy, Peter Carey and Kiran Desai. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, J.
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