Hubert Haddad was declared a Prix Littéraire Montluc Résistance et Liberté 2025 finalist on Tuesday, January 21, 2025.
Prix Montluc Resistance et Liberté (English: Montluc Resistance and Freedom Prize) is awarded to an author, whether French or foreign, whose work questions current methods of fighting against oppression in all its manifestations, or whose work represents in itself an act of resistance. Some of the previous winners of the award founded by Jean-François Carenco have been Itamar Vieira Junior, Jean d’Amérique, and Kaouther Adimi.
The longlist for the 2025 edition was announced on Tuesday, November 26, 2024, before the finalists were announced on Tuesday. Among them was La Symphonie Atlantique written by Hubert Haddad and published by Editions Zulma. That title comes with the following blurb;
A young German from the cultured bourgeoisie, and soon abandoned, Clemens looks like an elf roaming the mountains of the Black Forest. As the Nazi regime gradually tightens its grip, his life is shaken up from home to institute, with his violin as an extension of himself. The virtuosity with which he seizes the scores of the greatest allows him to escape forced enlistment in the Hitler Youth. Soon, terrible music arrives from the West, that of the deluge of Allied bombs that falls on the cities, taking the fate of all into the war… The Atlantic Symphony makes us hear Mozart or Mendelssohn in the din of the world, in a strange echo with our times. Hubert Haddad masterfully revives the German culture perverted by the Nazis and gives voice to the innocent, the children and the civilian populations who were bombed. Tragic, essential and overwhelming.
The winner will be announced on April 8.
Please support our work at Writing Africa with a one-off donation or regularly on PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon, or Mobile Money by clicking here.
Leave a Reply