Neige Sinno wins 21 Goncourt choices around the world
A novelist with a radical and poignant style, Neige Sinno made a lasting impression with her second book, Triste Tigre, in 2023. After two works that received critical acclaim, she finally won over critics and the public with a powerful novel that openly recounts the violence she endured during her childhood. Having recently received numerous awards, including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, she is now the recipient of 21 Choix Goncourt around the world.
Organised by the French cultural network abroad, the international Choix Goncourt awards recognize authors from the Goncourt selections and offer translations of the novels into the languages of the countries where they are awarded.
Updated on 25/09/2024
5 min
Born in Vars on May 22, 1977, Neige Sinno is a novelist of Lebanese descent through her father. After completing a thesis in American literature, titled "The Writing of Anxiety in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff," and studying in the United States and Mexico, she dedicated herself to writing and worked as a translator before becoming an adjunct literature professor at a university. A victim of repeated rape by her stepfather from ages 7 to 14, she filed a complaint against him, along with her mother, in 2000. He was ultimately sentenced to nine years in prison.
In 2007, she collaborated with Edmond Baudoin and published her first work, a collection of short stories titled La Vie des Rats. This was followed by an essay on the figures of the reader, for which she won the Lya Kostakowsky Prize, and then her first novel, Le Camion, released in 2018. It was with her book Triste Tigre that Neige Sinno eventually gained broader recognition and profoundly impacted minds. She has lived in Mexico for eighteen years, teaching literature and residing in a village in the Guadalajara region with her daughter and partner.
It was with Triste Tigre, her second novel, that Neige Sinno achieved resounding success. In this poignant work, she revisits her past and recounts the incest she suffered as a child. The ambition is radical, the style deliberately intimate and powerful, to recount the unspeakable. The writer exorcises her pain and her ghosts with an astonishing force, and sets about narrating the way in which the mechanisms of domination and the cycle of violence are created.
Triste Tigre has been shortlisted in most of the literary competitions, including the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Décembre. It has also won the Prix littéraire du Monde, the Prix Les Inrockuptibles, the Prix Femina, the Prix Blù Jean-Marc Roberts, and the Prix Goncourt des lycéens in 2023. So many awards to salute the birth of a talent and the importance of such a sensitive testimony at a time when speech is finally becoming free.
Neige Sinno is the most awarded author by the Choix Goncourt abroad in 2024. She has won 21 Choix Goncourt awards around the world: in Canada, Turkey, Slovakia, South Korea, Croatia, Ireland, the United States, India, the Netherlands, Austria, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Orient. The Choix Goncourt has existed since 1998 and now takes place in several dozen countries worldwide.
Organised by the French cultural network abroad, the Choix Goncourt aims to spread French literature and promote interculturality, as well as foster exchanges between students from different countries participating in this prize. The winners gain cultural enrichment, enhance their linguistic skills, develop critical thinking, and have the opportunity to meet prominent figures from the Francophone literary world.
- 2007
2007
Neige Sinno publishes her first work, "La Vie des Rats."
- 2018
2018
Her first novel, "Le Camion", is released in bookstores.
- 2023
2023
Her second novel, "Triste Tigre", which narrates her own childhood, wins numerous awards and brings her significant success.
- 2024
2024
Neige Sinno becomes the most awarded author by the Choix Goncourt abroad.