Great news for Antoine Wauters
In a famous Parisian restaurant, academicians were won over by the writing of Belgian author Antoine Wauters. His collection Le musée des contradictions won the Prix Goncourt for short stories.
Antoine Wauters is a poet, novelist and screenwriter from Liège. Having already won the Prix Première in 2014 for his novel 'Nos mères', he won fame again the following year as co-writer of the film Préjudice, a feature film starring the Belgian Arno and Nathalie Baye. Last year, he won the Prix Marguerite Duras for 'Mahmoud ou la montée des eaux', which will be translated into several languages.
Today, this Belgian author has achieved great success through a literary art form not sufficiently known to the general public: the short story. Le musée des contradictions is a collection of twelve short stories, twelve cries of anger written during lockdown. A poetic manifesto that proclaims the absurdities of our world and the underlying desire to revolt.
Elderly people want to escape from their retirement home, young people just want to go to the seaside. Each story is a cry, a dream, a desire. What if we changed the world and another possibility opened up to us. While the author sometimes hurts us, he always does it with magnificent penmanship, in a world where words have taken time to be integrated before being put on paper far removed from the immediacy of media speeches. And if everything seems dark, there is a glimmer of hope, with the poetry of the words offering a breath of oxygen, a moment of calm.
We all dream of another world but how can we align our speech with our actions? Dive into Antoine Wauters' short stories; you won't come out unscathed.