Renaudot des Lycéens Prize for Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit (JC Lattès)

After winning the FNAC Novel Prize and the France Télévisions Novel Prize, on 8 November Delphine de Vigan received the Renaudot des Lycéens Prize for Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit (JC Lattès).

De Vigan is the author of the bestseller No et moi, which sold over 400,000 copies all editions combined, won the 2008 Libraires Prize and was adapted for film by Zabou Breitman, as well as Les heures souterraines (2009), which sold nearly 100,000 copies in its first edition and has been translated all over the world. She was included in the last Goncourt selection, and lives in Paris.

Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit

“My mother Lucile’s pain was part of our childhood and later our adult life. Lucile’s pain is probably what my sister and I are composed of, but any attempt to explain it is doomed to fail. Writing can do nothing, or, at most, it allows me to ask questions and interrogate my memory. Lucile’s family, and therefore our own, has given rise to many hypotheses and commentaries throughout its history. The people that I met during my research spoke of fascination; this is a word I heard often during my childhood. My family embodies the noisiest and most spectacular aspects of joy, the untiring echoes of the dead and the repercussions of disaster. Today I also realize that, like so many other families, it also illustrates the destructive power of the Word and the force of silence.

Perhaps the book is nothing more than that, the tale of this quest, containing its own genesis in itself, its narrative wanderings and its incomplete attempts. But it would become a movement, from me towards her, hesitant and unfinished.”
In this amazing inquiry into the heart of family memory, where the most luminous reminiscences rub shoulders with hidden secrets, it is our own lives, faults and wounds that de Vigan succeeds in unfurling.