Renaudot Prize 2024: Gaël Faye crowned for “Jacaranda”, eight years after the success of “Petit Pays”

What he touches turns into gold. Eight years after the success of his first novel “Petit Pays”, which won the Goncourt prize for high school students, Gaël Faye, 42, was awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in French literature, the Renaudot, this Monday, November 4.

In his book “Jacaranda”, we follow Milan, a young Franco-Rwandan, as the author. He visits the African country for the first time and learns about the history of his mother’s family, who always kept silent about her personal tragedy. He decides to settle there, meeting more and more. A poignant, very personal and nuanced novel for the writer and musician, based in Kigali with his partner and their two daughters. And which is one of the big successes of this fall with more than 161,000 copies sold.

First noticed for his music

Born to a Rwandan mother who took refuge in Burundi to escape persecution against the Tutsis and to a French father, Gaël Faye was born in Bujumbura, capital of Burundi, in 1982. The civil war which broke out in the country in 1993 forced the family to flee. The teenager arrives in Versailles (Yvelines). Culture shock. He very quickly needs words to tell the story of exile.

And then in 2016, the Franco-Rwandan arrived on the literary scene without warning. His “Little Country” imposes its voice, a new breath, a crazy energy, following the daily life of a young boy caught up in the civil war in Burundi. It’s a hit, a popular and critical success, soon adapted into a film, a comic strip and a play.

“I had this feeling of being in the drum of the washing machine for a few years,” he told us when we met him in July. I was a little crushed by its reception, its echo. Everything becomes possible when you have success like that. »

He could have stopped there. Go elsewhere, get away from Burundi and Rwanda, to take a breather, “write a romantic comedy set in London,” he says with a smile. But a story comes to tickle the artist with a slender silhouette. That of Tutsi women, victims of the genocide which left a million dead between April and July 1994. Of her mother’s family, of whom she had spoken so little. And he tells himself that he wants to tell and understand. His relationship with this devastated country and his generation. The difficult reconstruction, the victims and the executioners, the scars and the still gaping wounds.

“The pen and the blank page are not a flattering mirror”

He locks himself in a room for a year. Cuts himself off from the world “to clear his mind”. “For weeks, I didn’t write, that was the hardest part,” he explained to us, not hiding the fact that he felt awaited at the turn for this second novel. It wasn’t coming. It is a form of meditation, creation. It’s silencing the noise within yourself. The pen and the blank page are not a flattering mirror. »

The writing, finally, springs forth. The book was finished in three months. The purple flowers of the Jacaranda, his favorite tree, almost a character in the book, which embodies the memory of those who are no more, are finally blooming. Powerful and radiant.

Gentle gaze, calm and calm voice, this sensitive and ultra-talented jack-of-all-trades has a strong sympathy capital, which strikes you as soon as you meet him. Very committed, Gaël Faye is also secretary of the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda and co-directed the documentary “Rwanda: the silence of words”, testimonies of three Tutsi women who recount their rapes by French soldiers in refugee camps, in 1994.

And the music? “I went back to the studio, I’m preparing an album. It will be released next year,” he told us this summer.