Dublin Literary Award Winners Alice Zeniter and Frank Wynne in Conversation with Michael Cronin

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Listen back to Alice Zeniter and Frank Wynne, winners of the 2022 Dublin Literary Award to the festival for an in-depth conversation about The Art of Losing.

Naïma has always known that her family came from Algeria – but up until now, that meant very little to her. Born and raised in France, her knowledge of that foreign country is limited to what she’s learned from her grandparents’ tiny flat in a crumbling French sink estate: the food cooked for her, the few precious things they brought with them when they fled.

On the past, her family is silent. Why was her grandfather Ali forced to leave? Was he a harki – an Algerian who worked for and supported the French during the Algerian War of Independence? Once a wealthy landowner, how did he become an immigrant scratching a living in France?

Naïma’s father, Hamid, says he remembers nothing. A child when the family left, in France he re-made himself: education was his ticket out of the family home, the key to acceptance into French society.

But now, for the first time since they left, one of Ali’s family is going back. Naïma will see Algeria for herself, will ask the questions about her family’s history that, till now, have had no answers.


About the Author

Alice Zeniter is a French novelist, translator, scriptwriter and director. Her novel Take This Man was published in English by Europa Editions in 2011. Zeniter has won many awards for her work in France, including the Prix Littéraire de la Porte Dorée, The Prix Renaudot des Lycéens and the Prix Goncourt de Lycéens, which was awarded to The Art of Losing. She lives in Brittany.

About the Translator

Frank Wynne is an Irish translator who has translated and published comics and graphic novels and began translating literature in the late 1990s. He has translated works by, among others, Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder and Ahmadou Kourouma , and has won a number of awards, including the DUBLIN Literary Award 2002, Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán.

Presented in partnership with the International Literature Festival Dublin. Both the Dublin Literary Award and International Literature Festival Dublin are major cultural initiatives of Dublin City Council. The award is worth €100,000 to the winner, and if the winning book is an English translation, €75,000 is awarded to the author and €25,000 to the translator.

Recorded on 23 May 2022.