Hemley Boum’s novel Le rêve du pêcheur won Prix littéraire des Sciences Po 2024 on Tuesday, June 4, 2024.
Sciences Po is France’s leading university for the social sciences, offering degrees at the undergraduate, Master’s, and Ph.D. levels. This year, the university’s alumni association inaugurated the Prix littéraire des Sciences Po (English: Sciences Po Literary Prize) to reward a work of fiction in French that reflects the university and “which allows us to understand our times.”
This new award had a jury, chaired by Jessica Nelson alongside Madeleine Clanet, Marin de Viry, Quentin Girard, Quentin Gassiat, Charlène Guinoiseau, Nolwenn Le Blevennec, Renaud Leblond, Pascal Perrineau and Minh Tran Huy.
The first winner of this award is Le rêve du pêcheur (English: The Fisherman’s Dream) by Hemley Boum, a novel about exile and the quest for self between post-colonial Cameroon and today’s France through three different generations. The intergenerational transmission of trauma and the potential repair by confronting the past are addressed in this work.
This novel, the Cameroonian’s fifth, also won Prix Louis-Guilloux 2024 in April.
