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Laferrière wins Medicis

Montreal author (and recent Q&Q cover star) Dany Laferrière is on a roll lately. After winning the $10,000 Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prix last week, he has now been named recipient of France’s illustrious Prix Medicis literary award, alongside U.S. author Dave Eggers.

According to AFP:

Laferrière won the Medicis for L’enigme du retour (The Enigma of Return), a fictionalised account of the 56-year-old author’s soul-wrenching return to his native Haiti to attend his father’s funeral. Born in Port-au-Prince but now living in Montreal and Miami, Laferrière has explored the themes of identity and exile in some 20 novels over the past 25 years.

Laferrière won the French-language prize, while Eggers won the prize for best foreign novel for his 2006 work What Is the What? Lafèrriere is only the second Canadian novelist to win the Medicis. The first was Marie-Claire Blais, who won in 1966 for Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel.

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