Emmanuel Carrère, in Paris on Friday, June 20, 2025. FANNY DE GOUVILLE / MODDS
The Prix Médicis was awarded to Kolkhoze by Emmanuel Carrère on Wednesday, November 5. It remains to be seen how this famously anxious writer, already a recipient of the Prix Femina for La Classe de neige (Class Trip, 1995) and the Renaudot for Limonov (2011), will take this latest honor. As a younger man, he did not hide his disdain for the vanity of the literary season. In one of the funniest passages of his book Le Royaume ("The Kingdom," 2014), in which he recounts his conversion to Catholicism in his thirties, the writer describes a visit to a bookstore where he passed by the tables of new novels like a monk walking past a poster for a pornographic film.
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In 'Kolkhoze,' Emmanuel Carrère becomes his mother's son
Of course, by the time he published Le Royaume, which won the Le Monde Literary Prize in 2014, Carrère had softened somewhat. He even went so far as to admit his regret that the Prix Goncourt had still eluded him: "I don't feel that I do things that are extraordinarily transgressive, more things that are very acceptable and, in fact, generally very well accepted. It just so happens that, apparently, the Académie Goncourt doesn't like them. Really, there's nothing I can do about it, that's their right."
