Winner of the Goncourt 2021 Award published in Portugal next year – Observador
You have free access to all Observer articles by being our subscriber.
The 2021 Goncourt Prize-winning novel will be published in Portugal next year by Quetzal, the publisher announced this Tuesday. The Portuguese edition will be translated by Cristina Rodriguez and Artur Guerra.
“It is with great pleasure and joy that a Quetzal announces that it has just acquired the publishing rights of the winner of the prestigious Goncourt Prize 2021, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. The most secret memory of men is the title of the award-winning novel, which has already been sold to thirty countries and whose Portuguese edition hits bookstores in 2022”, informed the publisher.
Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr wins Goncourt Award
The most secret memory of men it is, according to the publisher, “a masterful novel, inspired by the nefarious fate of the Malian writer Yambo Oulologuem”. The action of the book centers around the Senegalese writer TC Elimane and his book the inhuman’s labyrinth.
“Elimane disappeared without a trace, just as there seems to be no physical evidence of the work’s existence. Decades later, another young Senegalese aspiring writer, Diégane Latyr Fa-ye, wandering around Paris, finds the book. The first steps have been launched in an extraordinary epic, which crosses geographies and generations, the great tragedies of History, the life and work of writers, precisely in search of the most secret memory of men”, summarized Quetzal in a statement.
The elite of the Goncourt, the most important literary award in the French language, the The most secret memory of men was announced last Wednesday. The jury called the novel “a hymn to literature”, written in an “extravagant” way.
Born in 1990 in Senegal, author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is the youngest Goncourt Prize winner since Patrick Grainville in 1976. He is also the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded the prize.