The French writer Pascal Quignard (Verneuil-sur-Avre, 1948) was announced yesterday as the winner of the Formentor de les Lletres 2023 prize. The jury made the author deserving of this recognition “for the mastery with which he has rescued the genealogy of literary thought, for the dexterity 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 soul”.
The award ceremony, endowed with 50,000 euros, will take place at the end of September in Canfranc (Oscar). It will be there that Quignard will collect the testimony of last year’s winner, the Russian writer Liudmila UlÃtskaia.
Born into a family of musicians and specialists in classical literature, his interests in letters did not take long to blossom. In 1968 he studied Philosophy in Nanterre and a few years later he worked for the publishing house Gallimard, where he held various positions until he decided to move to the other side and retired to write.
Among his works stand out Una terraza en Roma (2000), which earned him the Grand Prize for Novel from the French Academy; Villa Amalia (2006), with which he won the Jean Giono award, and Las sombraserrantes (2002), winner of the Goncourt prize. Equally well-known are The Wurtemberg Salon (1986), All the Mornings of the World (1991), The Mysterious Solidarity (2011), Las Lágrimas (2016) and the recent El amor el mar (2022), set in the turbulent France of the Middle Ages of the 17th century and brought to bookstores with the help of Galaxia Gutenberg.
In 2019, Quignard was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar prize for his body of work; a work that counts, as the Formentor Foundation emphasizes, with characters “sneaky and complex, dense and evanescent, who articulate the most subtle psychological depths of the human personality”.
Throughout his career he has also written numerous essays, such as Pequeños tratados and the volumes of Último reino, in which he skilfully mixes fiction and reflection.
The jury for the Formentor prize is made up of the essayist Ramón Andrés; Spanish literature teacher 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.
