French and German prizewinners 2017

Following on from the recent post on Italian prizewinners, we now turn our attentions to the latest winners of major French (last covered in May 2017) and German (last covered in March 2017) prizes.

The Prix Goncourt was awarded to L’ordre du jour by Éric Vuillard (C205.d.4186).

The Prix Interallié went to Jean-René Van der Plaetsen for Nostalgie de l’honneur       (C205.d.4224).

Daniel Rondeau won the Grand prix du roman de l’Académie française for Mécaniques du chaos (C205.d.4223).

The Prix Médicis was awarded to Yannick Hanenel’s Tiens ferme ta couronne (C205.d.4222).

Italian literary prizewinners for 2017-2018

C213.c.429

We have customarily drawn attention to the major literary prizewinners in Italy, highlighting the winners of five important prizes. We last focused on the 2016 winners. Since our last blog post, those five major prizes have been awarded as follows:

The Strega prize: awarded in 2017 to Paolo Cognetti for his novel Le otto montagne (C213.c.429)

The Bagutta prize: awarded in 2017 to Vivian Lamarque for her novel Madre d’inverno (C205.d.4406) and in early 2018 to Helena Kaneczek for her novel La ragazza con la Leica (C213.c.6240)

French prizewinners 2016

Literary prizes are a good indicator of the quality of a work of fiction, and a criterion that the Library uses when collecting novels in foreign languages. Books that have won major French prizes are bought every year – see previous lists for 2009-2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.

2016 French prizewinners

Titles and classmarks of the main French prizewinners from 2016 are now available in our catalogue:

Prix Goncourt: Chanson douce : roman by Leïla Slimani, C204.d.9342

Prix Renaudot: Babylone by Yasmina Reza, C204.d.9327

Prix Renaudot essai: Le monde libre by Aude Lancelin, C212.c.3101

German prizewinners 2016

In previous posts we pointed out how literary prizes are useful for our collection development. By acquiring prizewinning works we document the evolving canon of German literature.  In this post I will present a selection of German literary prizes awarded recently.

Arguably the most prestigious prize for German language literature is the Georg-Büchner-Preis. The 2016 prize was awarded by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung to Marcel Beyer for his rich work which ranges from the epic to the lyric and essayistic. The Akademie said that “his texts devote themselves to the representation of the German past with the same precise dedication with which they trace the sound of the present time. They pursue a poetic geography, which is always also an exploration of language”. The latest works acquired by the University Library are his poetry collection Graphit (C203.d.8391) published in 2014 and his collection of essays Sie nannten es Sprache (C204.d.7081) published in 2016.

Italian literary prizewinners for 2016

C211.c.1831

We have written in the past of the five major Italian literary prizes and, since we started our blog, we have highlighted the prizewinners each year.

Here are the winners for 2016:

The Strega prize: awarded this year to Edoardo Albinati for his novel La scuola cattolica (C211.c.1831)

The Bagutta prize: awarded this year to Paolo Di Stefano for Ogni altra vita : storia di italiani non illustri (C211.c.4073) and to Paolo Maurensig for his novel Teoria delle ombre (C210.c.5964)