Femina Award 2025 for Nathacha Appanah

Mauritian-French writer Nathacha Appanah won the Prix Femina for fiction with La nuit au Coeur , published by Gallimard, which intertwines three stories of women who are victims of violence at the hands of their partners, the organization announced on Monday afternoon.

The writer Marc Weitzmann received the Femina Essay Prize for his book La part sauvage (Grasset), which draws on the author's friendship with Philip Roth to reflect on contemporary America, between identity, political chaos, and the end of a literary era.

Irish writer John Boyne, in turn, received the Femina Prize for Foreign Fiction with Les Éléments (JC Lattès), a work structured in four parts (“Water,” “Earth,” “Fire,” and “Air”) that explores the persistent effects of trauma, guilt, and silence within families affected by abuse and violence, through four narratives: a mother fleeing on an island, a young football prodigy, a burns surgeon, and a father embarking on a journey with his son.

According to the French press, the winner of the main prize, Nathacha Appanah, born in 1973, explores the mechanisms of control, fear , and humiliation experienced by women victims of domestic violence, based on her own experience and cases she has encountered, in an attempt to understand systemic male violence and femicide.

In La Nuit au Coeur , the author weaves together three narratives of women who were victims of marital violence: that of Chahinez Daoud, murdered by her husband in Mérignac in 2021; that of her cousin Emma, ​​killed by her husband in Mauritius in 2000; and her own story, after having lived under the control of a man thirty years her senior.

Chahinez Daoud, a mother of three young children, was burned alive by her estranged husband; Emma, ​​also a mother of three, was run over and killed by her husband; and Nathacha Appanah fled barefoot from her violent and paranoid partner.

The novel La Nuit au Coeur was also a finalist for the Goncourt Prize, which was awarded this Tuesday to Laurent Mauvignier for La Maison Vide , a novel that was also included in the final selection for the Femina Prize.

The remaining finalists were Au grand jamais , by Jakuta Alikavazovic, Un mal irréparable , by Lionel Duroy, and Le monde est fatigue , by the Swiss Joseph Incardona.

In statements to AFP, Nathacha Appanah expressed her happiness and noted that this is her twelfth book and her first major award.

"It's a book that took me a long time to write. It's a book about understanding darkness and the dynamics of violence," he added.

The Prix Femina opens an important week for the literary world: the Renaudot and Goncourt prizes were announced this Tuesday, and on Wednesday the winner of the Prix Médicis will be revealed, whose shortlist also includes Nathacha Appanah and Laurent Mauvignier.

The Femina Prize, awarded by an all-female jury of 12 members, was created in 1904 by 22 contributors to the women's magazine La Vie Heureuse , in opposition to the Goncourt Prize, which was exclusively awarded to men.

Last year, the winner of this award was the Franco-Venezuelan writer Miguel Bonnefoy, for Le rêve du jaguar , the story of a family whose story intertwines with the history of Venezuela, inspired by the author's ancestors.

In 1985, the Femina Étranger Prize was created, which has already distinguished authors such as Javier Marias, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Richard Ford, Sofi Oksanen, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Joyce Carol Oates, Manuel Vilas, Deborah Levy, and Rachel Cusk.