Silbi Germain is a Writer Who Faces Pain and Pursues Hope

The Park Kyung-ri Literary Award Judging Committee Publishes This Year's Winner Evaluation Comments

The Toji Cultural Foundation (Chairman Kim Sehee) on the 7th released the jury's evaluation of the 2024 13th Park Kyung-ni Literary Award winner, French writer Sylvie Germain.

The Park Kyung-ni Literary Award, established by the Toji Cultural Foundation in 2011, is Korea's first global literary prize awarded to the "most writerly writer of our time who preserves the intrinsic value of literature and has greatly influenced world literary history," targeting novelists worldwide in honor of writer Park Kyung-ni.

Previously, the 13th Park Kyung-ni Literary Award jury (Kang Jamo, Kim Seung-ok, Park Jong-so, Shin Jeong-hwan, Lee Segi, Jeong Hyunki, Choi Yoon) reviewed the nominated authors over about a year based on 27 global writers selected by the recommendation committee, narrowing the final candidates down to three: Sylvie Germain (France), Amitav Ghosh (India), and John Banville (Ireland).

After the final evaluation, Sylvie Germain was selected, and the Park Kyung-ni Literary Award Committee agreed with the jury's decision, confirming her as the 13th Park Kyung-ni Literary Award winner.

The jury stated in their evaluation, "Sylvie Germain is a writer who confronts the realistic suffering and the reality of evil faced by humanity worldwide while persistently pursuing the possibilities of life and hope. She is also a writer who contributes to recreating and expanding the long-standing potential of the novel genre in a modern context through language."

Born in 1954, Sylvie Germain is a French novelist and philosopher, a leading contemporary French writer captivating readers not only in France but worldwide. She has published over 20 novels and a total of 40 works including essays on art, poetry, religion, and biographies.

Sylvie Germain's works have won numerous literary awards such as the Femina Prize, International Lions Club Prize, Hermes Prize, Jean Giono Prize, and the Prix Goncourt selected by high school students. She has been a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium and was appointed honorary president of the Marguerite Duras Literary Prize.

Her debut novel , published in 1985, announced the birth of an extraordinary writer by winning six literary awards. This novel, which follows the breathless saga of the Feniel family named "the face of God," traverses wars marked by violence, madness, hatred, and fear?from the Franco-Prussian War to the Algerian War?depicting a chronicle of evil inherited by characters wounded by the catastrophes of history and abandoned by God.

However, beneath this work lies a discovery of life relying on divine grace, humanity moving toward vitality, and hidden historical currents. The same tone is maintained in the follow-up work , published two years later, where biblical imagination and magical realism coexist, showing originality in interpreting primal time and current historical events in a single work in a supra-temporal manner.

, published in 1989 and winner of France's Femina Prize, centers on the life of a lumberjack in the Morvan mountains. It deals with the tyrannical power of anger wielded over three generations, driven by possessiveness and obsession in the name of love, leading to acts of madness. His plans of rage destroy communities based on faith, purity, love, and good desires.

However, the work shows that there are things anger and obsession cannot destroy. By placing allegorical and mythical figures such as the eldest son who rejects the authority of evil, the plump wife who longs to share love as a physical manifestation, and their nine lively children like stars in the dark night sky throughout the black forest village, it poses fundamental questions about human nature.

, published in 2005, deals with the story of victims of the Nazi era that humanity still has not fully digested. A five-year-old orphan boy who lost his parents in Operation Gomorrah, the Anglo-American bombing of Hamburg, and suffers from illness, is adopted by a family whose father was a gas executioner at a Nazi concentration camp.

After the war, the man, now an adult who changed his name to Magnus?the name of a doll he had as a child?continues a confusing search and wandering to find his identity, seeking the father who lives in hiding, concealing his identity and name. During this journey, the protagonist uncovers the fact that his adoptive parents were Nazi collaborators and reveals their past evil deeds.

This journey is a process of restoring truth and reconciling with oneself in silence. Reflecting the chaotic search for identity, the chapters are arranged out of order, and various types of texts are inserted between chapters, allowing the protagonist's individual story to communicate with countless traces of an era.

The wandering exploration in symbolically shows an important characteristic of Sylvie Germain's literary world. While there is a geographical and mourning departure to Prague, where the author stayed as a philosophy and French teacher and which is one of the representative cities symbolizing European tragedies including the Holocaust, Sylvie Germain's writing themes are also traces of many artistic, spiritual, and literary departures. Her works do not overlook the aspects of life being disregarded and destroyed and are directed toward souls wounded by the times.

Sylvie Germain's works confront the realistic suffering and reality of evil faced by humanity worldwide while persistently pursuing the possibilities of life and hope, deeply questioning the status of modern humanity and our own faces.

Moreover, the original narrative based on cosmic imagination, the sensory, contemplative, and poetically beautiful language shown in Sylvie Germain's literary world have contributed to recreating and expanding the long-standing potential of the novel genre in a modern context. Therefore, the Park Kyung-ni Literary Award jury unanimously decided to award Sylvie Germain the 13th Park Kyung-ni Literary Award.

Park Kyung-ni Literary Award Jury

13th Park Kyung-ni Literary Award Jury Members (in alphabetical order)

Kang Jamo, Kim Seung-ok, Park Jong-so, Shin Jeong-hwan, Lee Segi, Jeong Hyunki, Choi Yoon