The prolific Franco-Argelina writer Hélène Cixous (Oran, 87 years) has won the Formentor Award for Letters “for a literary work that has expanded the most illustrious heritage of European culture,” said the jury in the statement, in which “the personality of his style, his intrepid sense of creative sovereignty and the amplitude of the intellectual disciplines that he has integrated into his numerous and protein work ”. The author has touched different sticks, “Philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, history, intimate memory and dreamlike reverie.” The note adds from Cixous that she is an author “arranged to permanent interrogation and the inquisitive gaze that wants to narrate everything.”
Cixous has received numerous awards in his country and has been recognized as a doctor honor in universities around the world. “Through a hundred works and more than sixty years of meticulous and tenacious writing, with their essays, novels, plays and academic activity, it has contributed in a decisive way to configure the feminine awareness, its place in the transformations of our century and its emancipation of the blind inertia of history.” Among his books are the essays The arrival in writing (Amorrortu) and Poets in painting. Writings about art: from Rembrandt to Nancy Spero (She); Theater works, The city perjura or the awakening of the Erinias (Ellago) and fiction books The reveries of wild woman (Hours and hours) and The love of the wolf (Arena books).
Born in 1937, daughter of a Jewish German mother Asquenazí and Algerian father Jewish Sephardic, moved to live in Paris in 1955, graduated in 1959 and obtained her doctorate in letters in 1968. He specialized in English literature, especially in the work of James Joyce. In 1968, he published The exile of James Joyce or the art of replacement And, the following year, his first novel, Insidea work of autobiographical evocations.
In 1969 he was appointed Professor of English Literature at the University of Paris 8 and five years later he would found the center of Etminines et d’études de Genre, which offered the first doctoral program in women’s studies in Europe. She is the author of a work translated into multiple languages and of great influence in the field of postmodernism and feminist criticism. It is part of the generation of French renovating intellectuals and writers of contemporary thought, such as Derrida, Foucault, Bataille and Deleuze.
The jury statement emphasizes that in his books “he has realized the wounds open by exile, misfortune and the enigma of adversity.” “His sensitivity and narrative expertise has allowed him to reveal the most hidden hardships of human experience.” “His tense and enervated pulse with the word has allowed him to shape the unpublished expressive findings that have enriched the literary language.”
The jury, gathered in Valencia, has been formed by Claudia Casanova, Víctor Gómez Pin, Marta Rebón, Marta Segarra, and as president, Basilio Baltasar. The award ceremony will be held in October at the Teatro Real in Madrid.