The 42-year-old Franco-Rwandan rapper took eight years to write his second novel, inspired by his own life and links with Rwanda.
Gaël Faye or Kamel Daoud? Just last week, predictions were being made all over Paris. A duel was expected between the two authors. If one was to win the Goncourt, the other was to win the Renaudot. And now it’s done. At 12:45pm, the 122e Goncourt Prize awarded in the first round to Kamel Daoud for Mice published by Gallimard, and the Prix Renaudot, awarded by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, its president for this 2024 edition, went to Gaël Faye for Jacaranda published by Grasset. The Renaudot Essay Prize was awarded to Sébastien Lapaque (Actes Sud) and the Prix Renaudot Poche to Serge Rezvani, for Les Années-lumière, (Philippe Rey’s Fugues collection).
Further reading
Gaël Faye: our review of Jacaranda, Prix Renaudot 2024
Right up to the end, we thought Faye would win the Prix Goncourt. In fact, he seemed to have the ideal profile: a popular author, poet and slam poet, a best-seller since his first novel, which has been adapted for film, theater and comics. Yet, despite the rumors, even Grasset didn’t believe it. When asked “Can Faye win the Goncourt? the publishing house replied defeatistly: “Everyone says Daoud”. She recalled that in 2016, Gaël Faye had already been shortlisted for the Goncourt for his first novel “Petit pays” and finally came away empty-handed (with the Prix Goncourt des lycéens all the same!) against, already, a Gallimard author. And then.., Jacaranda didn’t need the Goncourt to find its place in bookshops: since its release in August, the novel has sold 173,000 copies, with peaks of 20,000 copies in some weeks. In any case, the Renaudot prize is a fine one, rewarding a very young work as well as a publishing house. With JacarandaGrasset wins its 3rd Renaudot prize. The latest was Simon Liberati in 2022.
Read also
Kamel Daoud wins the Prix Goncourt 2024 with Houris
An accolade not only for Grasset, but also for the 42-year-old author of only his second novel. Precision is important, as juries are very sensitive to it. In 2017, Olivier Guez won the Prix Renaudot with The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (Grasset) and in 2018, Valérie Manteau, won with Le Sillon (Le Tripode). Yet, by his own admission, Gaël Faye does not consider himself a writer. Despite the incredible success of his first novel Petit Paystranslated into 45 languages, sold over a million copies, and has been adapted for film, stage and comic strip.
That’s the author’s charm. 1m93 of humility and poetry. Born in Burundi in 1982 to a Rwandan mother and French father, Gaël Faye moved to the Paris region of France at the age of 13. A good student and hip-hop and rap fan, he first went into exile in London for work, before returning to his first love: music. When he’s not in the bookshop, Faye is a rapper, composer and performer. A successful one too (he won the revelation stage of the year at the 2018 Victoires de la musique awards). Far from the race for German-language publications, Faye took his time (eight years) to write Jacaranda. A novel inspired by his own life and ties with Rwanda, in which he analyzes the reconstruction of a country traumatized by the Tutsi genocide in 1994. Coincidence of the calendar? The year 2024 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the commemoration of this massacre.
The story: April 1994. Milan is 12 years old and lives in Versailles between a French father and a Rwandan mother who has never spoken to him about her country or her family. One day, however, Rwanda enters their lives. A 12-year-old boy stands in the middle of the living room, ribs exposed, a thick bandage on his shaven head. Claude had been wounded in the war. Milan made him his brother, but the boy had already been sent home. As the years go by, so do the memories.
It’s July 1998. Milan’s mother offers to accompany him to Rwanda. There, the teenager discovers that he has a grandmother and a young uncle who survived the genocide. He meets another survivor, his mother’s childhood friend, who lost all four of her children in the massacres, has just had a baby, and is reunited with young Claude. At the beginning of the book, Milan turns his European eyes on Kigali. “Gutters of dirty, used water ran between the tin-roofed houses, plastic bags trailed in the gutters.” Claude is enraged. “You come here as a tourist and leave thinking you’ve had a good vacation. But you don’t vacation in a land of suffering. This country is poisoned. We live with killers all around us, and it drives us crazy.” Milan unlearns what he thinks he knows. And the years go by. Milan returns to Rwanda. When he was a law student, to write a dissertation on the people’s tribunals responsible for judging genocidaires. Then, like the author, he will settle there for good.
It’s not an autobiographical book,” Gaël Faye explained to L’Humanité. I’m a long way from Milan, the hero. There are, of course, a few elements from my own life. It’s a work woven from real and plausible facts.” Milan watches, listens, takes notes, describes the difficult reconstruction of a country that lives three months a year in mourning as it commemorates the 1994 massacres. In its August 29 issue, Le Figaro wrote: “Through a well-scripted narrative, Gaël Faye attempts to compose a fair and nuanced picture of Rwandan society and its past, plunging into the origins of the violence – a long history evoked through the memories of the elderly Rosalie, born in 1895, who knew the court of the kings of Rwanda, a character whose life would deserve a whirlwind novel of its own.”