The writer Didier Decoin, winner of the Goncourt Prize in 1977 and former president of its jury, has died

“Didier Decoin was a novelist who had a high idea of language and literature as his work testifies,” greeted the Goncourt Academy in a press release. Born March 13, 1945 in Boulogne-Billancourt, he is the son of the filmmaker Henri Decoin, to whom he paid homage in Henry or Henry: My Father’s Novel, in 2006, and Juliette Charpenay.

He began a career as a journalist in the 1960s, first at France-Soir, first French daily by circulation, then Figaro, by collaborating in particular on the pages of the literary supplement. It is also within the editorial staff of the Figaro that one of his colleagues discovers the manuscript of his very first novel, The Trial of Love, to send it to a publisher, in this case Le Seuil, who published it in 1966. He was then 21 years old. Then, Didier Decoin lends his pen to the weekly VSD, to Literary news, and tried his hand at radio, on the airwaves of Europe 1. After The Trial of Love, follow The Birth, Laurence, then a first American novel, Abraham of Brooklyn, crowned with the Booksellers Prize in 1971.

Public and critical success would come later, in 1977, with John Hell , dizzying and delirious novel featuring a Cheyenne tile washer in New York, and which earned him the Goncourt Prize and the recognition of his peers.

Four years ago, when the novel was reissued in the collection “Le Meilleur du prix Goncourt” published by Le Figaro and the Académie Goncourt, Paule Constant, member of the jury which meets at Drouant, declared: “With John Hell, Didier Decoin writes the strongest and most tragic novel of this generation. This is all the more disturbing given that, with a previous novel, he had Abraham of Brooklyn, dedicated a hymn to the new city. Here, in two volumes, the birth and death of New York told by a very young writer who is not only a travel writer but a great novelist, who starts from reality to nourish his fantasies about the city of cities of which he makes a fictional character. To write New York, Didier Decoin became an American writer. »

A career as a screenwriter and dialogue writer

At the time, from the beginning of the 1970s, Didier Decoin also worked for television (including an adaptation of Cinq-Mars by Alfred de Vigny and that of a series by Josée Dayan based on The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas père, with Gérard Depardieu), and cinema, as a screenwriter and dialogue writer. This Monte Cristocathodic film earned him the Sept d’Or for best screenplay in 1999. We owe him in particular the scenarios of The Best Visit, by Marcel Carné (1974), byA good little devil, by Jean-Claude Brialy,I… like Icarus by Henri Verneuil, a film directed by Yves Montand, and, in 1990, by Dancing Machine (co-author) with in the main role, Alain Delon. Let us add his collaboration with Maroun Bagdadi with whom he will receive, for the film Outside of life, taken from‘A hostage in Beirut by Roger Auque, the special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.

About the links between cinema and literature, Didier Decoin declared just a few weeks ago, to the Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour : “I consider that the margin between literature and cinema (between words and images) is increasingly narrow, and I rejoice in that. Writing is undoubtedly trying to deliver a “message”, but this message is more easily decipherable if it can be based on images. Personally, my writing aims to bring images to life in the reader’s head. This is why I attach such importance to descriptions, to everything that can provoke a sensory reaction in the reader. I can’t write a scene if I don’t visualize it in every detail – and “visualize” is to be taken here in the literal sense of the verb. »

Author of around forty works, including essays, Didier Decoin had put together some excellent novels which dominate his production. Let us highlight among them: The Maid of the Titanic, in 1991, which was adapted for the cinema by the Spaniard Bigas Luna. The following year, it was in a tribute to Lewis Carroll that he distinguished himself with Lewis and Alice, which opens with an epigraph from Albert Camus: “So he will turn to the times of his life when the love of life was mixed with the despair of living. » Let us also mention his superb tribute to the Cotentin peninsula, his second homeland, where he lived with his family for almost half a century, in an old fisherman’s house, in La Hague, facing the Raz Blanchard. Its title: With sea view, story awarded the Henri-Queffélec prize, where he writes: “The rain is the priestess of my country. »

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In the meantime, Didier Decoin was elected to the Académie Goncourt, under the cover of the poet, novelist and publisher Jean Cayrol. It was in 1995, just before the publication of a new novel, The Bird Walker. And in 2020, he was appointed president of the more than century-old institution, succeeding Bernard Pivot, before resigning in the spring of 2024. It was under his presidency that a variation of the famous literary award was created, the Goncourt prize for prisoners, supported by the National Book Center (CNL) and the state prison services, which allows 500 prisoners of forty establishments to read the fifteen novels appearing each year on the long-awaited first Goncourt list, and to actively participate in a literary distinction. On the occasion of the second edition of this particular prize, he declared, in an effort to dust off the old institution: “Logically, we are required by the Goncourt wills to give priority to a work in prose, to a novel. For my part, I believe that we must stop becoming ossified. »

The Bible and the various facts

We also owe Didier Decoin two works published in the “Le Dictionnaire amours” collection from Plon: one on the Bible, in 2009, which echoes his previous essay Jesus the God who laughed (published by Stock); the other on news items, in which he had also summoned Emma Bovary, the author of In cold blood, Truman Capote, Bizet’s Carmen, and the cannibals who escaped from Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya flight 571. “Actually, I know today, he confides throughout the 800 pages of the work, neither my father nor I liked news items. On the contrary, we loathed them, they revolted us, offended us, repulsed us. » And he added: “What we loved, but then passionately, were the characters who haunted them, the victims, the scoundrels, the vigilantes, the bastards, the age-old duelists. »

The news item: a genre and a section that has always fascinated him, and which he also brilliantly illustrated in his latest work published four months ago by Stock: Maypops. He returned to a dramatic news story taking place in South Carolina, a segregationist state then under the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, in 1944, that involving a young black teenager of 14, Georges Stinney Jr., wrongly accused of having murdered two little girls, and sentenced to death without evidence or motive. On this occasion, he confided to the Literary Figaro : “What triggers writing is first and foremost an emotion. A strong emotion, sometimes a form of instinctive sympathy for the person designated as guilty. I always say to myself: there must be some light in him. It’s human beings that interest me. They are the ones who make me write, who make me engage with the world. »

Previously, Didier Decoin had published one of his most beautiful books, and one of the most singular, carried out with his sensitive and lyrical brilliance as a born storyteller. This Gardens and Ponds Officeplunged us into medieval Japan, through the destiny of a young peasant girl, Miyuki, whose husband, a carp fisherman for the imperial city, had just died drowned.

A love of the maritime world

In the evening of his life, Didier Decoin began to frequent other places, to explore other latitudes. After Japan, he set his scene in Tunisia in the 1920s, to tell the story, in The Swimmer of Bizerte, published three years ago, the story of a young and poor dockworker, Tarik, and his meeting with Yelena, a declassed Russian aristocrat.

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The author of Peninsula of light and of Cherbourg had at the same time remained faithful to his favorite universe, that of the sea, the islands and the coast. Passionate about navigation, he was a long-time columnist for the magazine Neptune Motor. He had also chaired the association of Marine Writers, created by Jean-François Deniau around twenty years ago, in partnership with the French Navy, and which counts among its members Sylvain Tesson, Isabelle Autissier, Olivier Frébourg, its current president Patrice Fransceschi, our colleague from Figaro, Arnaud de La Grange and Yann Queffélec.

He passed this love of the maritime world on to his three children, including Julien, born in 1985, assistant director, novelist and author of a noted Suddenly the sea, published in 2017 by his father’s first publisher.

And the final word, let’s leave it to Didier Decoin, who noted in I see gardens everywhere, his most unusual, most bucolic book: “Maybe I’ll grow old there in my garden, I hope so. But I will never feel old there. »