Presented as part of the Festival Étonnants Voyageurs, the Joseph Kessel Prize, with a prize of 5,000 Euros, devotes the author of a literary work in French (biography, novel, travel account, documentaary story or essay) published between March 2018 and February 2019).

The jury, chaired by Olivier Weber and composed of Tahar Ben Jelloun, Annick Cojean, Marc Dugain (2018 laureate), Colette Fellous, Pierre Haski, Michele Kahn, Gilles Lapouge, Michel Le Bris, Benoit Peeters, Patrick Rambaud and Guy Seligmann, selected the novel "Maître-minuit" by the Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel alongside 7 other writers.

List of selected works :

"La vérité sort de la bouche du cheval" de Meryem Alaoui (Esitions Gallimard)

"Le Lion sans crinière" de Édouard Bureau (Esitions Sable polaire)

"On ne vit qu’une heure" de David Dufresne (Esitions du Seuil)

"Âmes de Tristan Garcia" (Esitions Gallimard)

"Le Fil de nos vies brisées" de Cécile Hennion (Esitions Anne Carrière)

"Après Gerda" de Pierre-François Moreau (Esitions du Sonneur)

"Maître-minuit " de Makenzy Orcel (Esitions Zulma)

"Roissy" de Tiffany Tavernier (Esitions Sabine Wespieser)

Learn more about "Maître-minuit" :

"Poto was born under the sad tropics of a bloody dictatorship, of an unknown father and Marie Élitha Demosthenes Laguerre, his alleged mother who wanders every night in the glue vapors. But Poto has a real gift for perching at the stars, dreaming his life, telling the world and drawing.

With only his treasure trove in a backpack, Poto gets under way. He mimes the madman so that the fauna of the city will leave him in peace, alive with larceny and juggling... Until the day he puts himself under the strange protection of a hitman in the pay of the regime.

Here is the striking and beautiful story of a tightrope walker, a surveyor who learns life by walking, like Maître-Minuit (Master-Midnightà, legendary Haitian giant, a man standing, who always advances, whatever happens."

Recall that Makenzy Orcel, born in Port-au-Prince in 1983 received in 2016, the Louis Guilloux Prize and the 2016 Literature-World Prize for his third novel "L'Ombre animale".

S/ HaitiLibre