Grégoire Polet
Winner of the 2006 Writer Grant Special Award
His latest novel, Leurs vies éclatantes [Their beautiful lives], released in September 2007 by Gallimard, received the Prix Fénéon and the Prix Grand-Chosier (ex-Prix Vialatte) awards.
Paris, during a week of sweltering heat. From Monday through to Saturday, around the Saint-Sulpice church during a wedding and a funeral, twenty main characters will cross paths, bump into each other, fall in love and out of love. Some will complete important projects, while others will see all their hopes come to nothing. In successive scenes, the novel Leurs vies éclatantes will explore these interweaving lives with exceptional talent, making up a web of thought both jubilant and profound on love and art.
Grégoire Polet's novel, Leurs vies éclatantes received the Prix Fénéon and the Prix Grand-Chosier (ex-Prix Vialatte) awards.
The Prix Fénéon award is a literary prize created in 1949. Every year, it rewards two winners, a young writer and a young painter or sculptor aged 35 or less. Chronicler and art critic, Félix Fénéon died in 1944, leaving behind him an impressive collection of paintings. The sale of this collection enabled his widow, Fanny Fénéon, to set up the Université de Paris as sole legatee. The latter was to create and award a number of prizes in the name of the Fénéon Foundation.
The Prix Grand-Chosier award was created in the year 2000 by Denis Wetterwald and dissidents of the Prix Alexandre Vialatte award. Awarded to Saint-Emilion, this Prize rewards a book with original tone and also gives the winner the right to a case of Château Soutard wine.
Grégoires Polet's achievements since winning the Talent Grant
In december 2006, Grégoire Polet has awarded the price Rossel des Jeunes (from the newspaper Le Soir, Bruxelles) for his second novel Excusez les fautes du copistes (published by Gallimard).
In the newspaper Le Monde dated from the 16th of march, is published the manifest “Pour une literature-monde”, on Jean Rouau and Michel Le bris initiative, co-signed by 44 writers, as Grégoire Polet.
In addition, Grégoire were the writer who represented the French community of Beligum, for the Week of the European literature, organized from the 7th to the 11th of may 2007 by the UE country, headed by Germany and in collaboration with the INBA (Institut Mexicain des Beaux Arts).
Short Story
To read Gregoire Polet' short story written on Nuit Blanche 2007, an event organized by Paris Town Hall, click here (in french).
His portrait
Grégoire Polet was never a big reader – he didn’t feel the need to escape. Even so, he was fascinated by books. At 15, he realized that he could give the best of himself by writing, and set out to compose poetry. Writing became his primary occupation. While living in Spain and working on his Ph.D. in contemporary literature, Polet wrote his first book, Madrid ne Dort Pas (Madrid Does Not Sleep). He continued when he returned to Belgium, publishing Excusez les Fautes du Copiste (Excuse the Copyist’s Mistakes). According to Polet, both books are part of the same larger work. The first was a wide-angle shot of the world, which he examined in close-up in the second. The third, still in the works, will refer back to the first. It’s a bit like Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy) or a Haydn composition – his two essential points of reference.AWARD-WINNING PROJECT: to represent humanity, if only in fragments, through characters who participate (unbeknownst to them) in the vast network that links and binds them.
