The French writer Pascal Quignard (Verneuil-sur-Avre, 1948) wins the 2023 Formentor Prize for Letters. This was announced this Wednesday by the jury, which ensures that the author is deserving of this recognition “for the mastery with which he has rescued the genealogy of literary thought, for the skill with which he evades textual banality, for having solved the most unexpected dimensions of writing and for the composition of his great treatise on the literary enigmas of the human soulâ€.
The award ceremony, endowed with 50,000 euros, will take place at the end of next September in Canfranc (Huesca). It will be there that Quignard will pick up the baton from the Russian writer Liudmila UlÃtskaya, winner last year. In the coming weeks, the complete program of the Conversations and the topics that will be addressed in the different sessions of the literary meeting will be announced.
Born into a family of musicians and specialists in classical literature, his interests in letters did not take long to flourish. In 1968 he studied philosophy at Nanterre and a few years later he worked for the Gallimard publishing house, where he held various positions until he retired to write.
His works include A Terrace in Rome (2000), which won him the Grand Prize for Novels from the French Academy; Villa Amalia (2006), for which he won the Jean Giono Grand Prize; and Wandering Shadows (2002), winner of the Goncourt Prize. Equally well-known are The Wurtemberg Hall (1986), Every Morning in the World (1991), Mysterious Solidarities (2011), Las Lágrimas (2016) and the recent El amor el mar (2022).
In 2019 he was distinguished with the Marguerite Yourcenar prize for his body of work. A work that recounts, as the Formentor Foundation emphasizes, characters that are “elusive and complex, dense and evanescent and articulate the most subtle psychological depths of the human personality”.
Throughout his career he has also written numerous essays, such as Little Treatises and the Last Kingdom volumes, in which he skilfully mixes fiction and reflection.
The jury for the Formentor award is made up of the essayist Ramón Andrés; the professor of Spanish Literature Anna Caballé; the journalist, writer and academic of the Spanish language Juan Luis Cebrián; the essayist and professor of philosophy VÃctor Gómez Pin; and the writer, editor and journalist Basilio Baltasar.
