During the Festival, a jury comprising journalists and writers François Armanet, Marie Chaudey, Bruno Corty, Tiffany Gassouk and Éric Neuhoff will present the Lucien-Barrière Prize for American Fiction, organised by Béatrice Nakache Halimi.
The 2026 Lucien-Barrière Prize for American Fiction is awarded to Siri Hustvedt for “Ghost Stories”, published by Éditions Gallimard and translated from the English (US) by Frédéric Joly.
In “Ghost Stories”, a work of rare intimacy, Siri Hustvedt opens up for the first time about the great love of her life, Paul Auster. In it, she celebrates their long and magnificent life together, and draws us into the most secret corners of their legendary New York writers’ couple. “Ghost Stories” is also a chronicle of the loss of a loved one, drawing on memories, readings and written records — all attempts to come to terms with absence and to welcome signs from the afterlife. A breathtaking book about love and grief that offers us a compass to help us stay connected to all those we have lost too soon.
“They were an iconic literary couple, worthy of every superlative: Siri Hustvedt and her partner Paul Auster shared intelligence, talent, beauty and humour. And a bond that lasted more than 40 years, until that day in April 2024 when Paul died of lung cancer diagnosed sixteen months earlier. So, in the wake of this catastrophe, turning to words became a necessity for the woman left alone, bereft of her soulmate. Siri Husvedt, who has long written not only novels but also essays on the social sciences, draws here on every register at her disposal to recount the unspeakable: the illness and the struggle they waged together, the pain and loss in all their stark reality, but also the presence of the other despite their absence. There is no chronological narrative; the writer alternates between a diary of struggle and mourning, medical reports, a list of medications, and emails sent to loved ones from what she calls ‘Cancerland’, alongside letters written by Paul Auster to his grandson Miles, who was just a few months old and whom he would not have time to see grow up. Siri Hustvedt admits to striving for the utmost honesty, revealing her innermost thoughts whilst keeping them in check, and making no secret of the tragedy that struck the family in 2022 — the death of Paul’s eldest son. But throughout these 400 intensely moving pages, it is love that prevails – the love that binds generations as much as it does their immediate circle, and, of course, the close, interwoven bond between the two writers, that ‘organic’ love: like a tree, capable of weathering storms and sprouting new branches. A love that never grew stale, she says, in which literary kinship also played an essential role. Their relationship itself was a joint endeavour, intertwined with their separate bodies of work. And its story lives on in the literary legacy of Siri Hustvedt, whom we have the great pleasure of honouring in Deauville.”
Marie Chaudey
Siri Hustvedt is an American writer and essayist born in 1955. Internationally renowned, her work explores the links between identity, memory, art, psychoanalysis and neuroscience. The author of major novels such as “Everything I Loved” (Actes Sud, 2010) and “A Blazing World” (winner of the 2014 Prix Transfuge for best American novel), she is also a committed intellectual.
With “Ghost Stories”, translated into more than thirty languages, Siri Hustvedt makes her debut in the Gallimard catalogue.
A conversation with Siri Hustvedt:
A discussion (in English) translated by Tiffany Gassouk (Gallimard) and moderated by Bruno Corty (literary journalist & editor-in-chief of *Le Figaro*)
Wednesday 9 September at 4.00 pm
Followed by a book signing
At Franciscaines
145b Avenue de la République
14800 Deauville
