Posts Tagged ‘Brodeck’

Philippe Claudel wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

May 14th, 2010

We’re thrilled to announce that Philippe Claudel’s haunting novel Brodeck is the winner of this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The French novelist—and film director—shares the £10,000 award with translator John Cullen. The Independent writes, “[Brodeck is] a beautiful, sinister and haunting fable of persecution, resistance and survival . . . that has all the spine-tingling intensity of a waking dream. . . . Claudel prevailed with his hallucinatory story—almost a dark fairy-tale in which Kafka meets the Grimms—of an uneasy homecoming after wrenching tragedy. . . . Written with a lyrical but solemn grace to which John Cullen’s English does rich justice, this book both is, and is not, a novel about the moral wastelands left behind by the Holocaust and other modern killing-fields.”

Claudel is the author of many novels, among them By a Slow River, which has been translated into thirty languages and was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 2003 and the Elle Readers’ Literary prize in 2004. Brodeck won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens in 2007. Claudel also wrote and directed the film I’ve Loved You So Long starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein.