For the 6th edition of the Emile Guimet prize, which took place this Friday, January 20, it was a first-time novelist who was crowned. With “Drift of souls and continents” (Métailié, translated from English by Céline Schwaller), the Indian Shubhangi Swarup won the bet against other three candidates: the Chinese Zhang Yueran for “Hôtel du Cygne” (Zulma) , the Sri Lankan Antonythasan Jesuthasan for “The Red Tern” (Zulma) and the Iranian Shokoofeh Azar for “When the wild plum tree lights up” (Charleston).
Initiated by the national museum of Asian arts Guimet, the competition rewards since 2017 a book published in France during the last two years, dating from less than 15 years in its original language, and whose author is must come from an Asian country. In 2022, the Malaysian writer of Chinese origin NG Kim Chew had been distinguished for “Rain” (Picquier).
The Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature for NG Kim Chew
“An ecological novel”
Chaired by actress and director Zabou Breitman and the president of the national museum of Asian arts, Yannick Lintz, the jury chose “an ecological novel where humans, nature, geology, geopolitics and religion mingle, where the stories seem to arise organically along a fault line that shakes the earth and all that it contains the Indian Ocean to the Himalayas.
A resident of Bombay born in 1982 in Nashik, in the state of Marahashtra, Shubhangi Swarup is a journalist and director. In “Drift of Souls and Continents”, the 41-year-old author, winner of the Charles Pick Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia (Norwich), begins by telling the story of newlyweds who know that they loved each other in another life and settled on the Andaman Islands. Between witchcraft, angry elephants, mountains and ghosts, she interweaves the symbolic and the real by inventing a genre apart: the fiction of nature. She signs with this first work a novel deeply rooted in Indian culture where the past and the present mix to form one.
Shubhangi Swarup received the prize, endowed with 5000 euros, at the Guimet museum this Friday, January 20 on the occasion of the Nights of Reading, organized by the National Book Center.
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To note : Chaired by Zabou Breitman, actress and director, alongside Yannick Lintz, president of the Guimet museum, the jury is made up of Line Papin, author, Guillaume Husson, general delegate of the French library union, Olivier Roellinger, chef, and Maria Lund, gallery owner.
Also to note: The latest news from the literary awards can be found here.
