Lucien-Barrière Literary Award

Lucien-Bar­rière Lit­er­ary Award

A jury com­posed of jour­nal­ists and writ­ers François Armanet, Ari­ane Bois, Tiffany Gas­souk, Colombe Sch­neck and Éric Neuhoff will hand out the Lucien-Bar­rière Lit­er­ary Award dur­ing the Deauville Amer­i­can Film Fes­ti­val, under the aegis of Béa­trice Nakache Halimi.

The 2023 Lucien-Bar­rière Lit­er­ary Award goes to Katie Kita­mu­ra’s “Inti­ma­cies,” pub­lished by Stock in France.

The book

Flee­ing New York after her father’s death, the nar­ra­tor set­tles in The Hague to become an inter­preter for the Inter­na­tion­al Court. An anony­mous, trilin­gual woman lost in this city where noth­ing stands out, she’s seek­ing a sense of home and sta­bil­i­ty, specif­i­cal­ly find­ing it in her work, which requires extreme rig­or, neu­tral­i­ty and con­cen­tra­tion. She seems con­tent with this lack­lus­ter exis­tence. But sev­er­al jolts and tremors begin to upset this rou­tine. Adri­aan, her Dutch lover, new­ly sep­a­rat­ed from his wife, can’t make up his mind to get divorced. Her friend Jana is obsessed with an assault she wit­nessed down­stairs at her place, and the nar­ra­tor finds her­self in the mid­dle of a polit­i­cal cri­sis when she has to inter­pret for a for­mer pres­i­dent accused of war crimes. A qui­et, lev­el-head­ed woman accus­tomed to going with the flow, she finds her­self plunged in a tem­pest of betray­al, love, sor­row and vio­lence, forc­ing her to choose what her life will be.