The Chadourne Prize

Winner of the Prix Chadourne 2024

The 2024 prize has been awarded to Hemley Boum for Le rêve du pêcheur. The prize will be presented on Saturday 9 November at 7pm in the Chapelle Saint-Libéral as part of the Brive Book Fair.

This novel, which explores feelings of exile and the need to understand one's origins, also won over the Prix Chadourne jury, who met last Thursday in the Senate, with its poetic language and the depth of its message. True to the spirit of the two brothers Louis and Marc Chadourne, writers, journalists and travellers from Brivé to whom the prize is dedicated.

Hemley Boum is a writer of Cameroonian origin who was already honoured in 2020 for her novel Les jours viennent et passent, also published by Gallimard. Le rêve du pêcheur is her fifth novel. The story is divided between Zack, who fled Cameroon at the age of eighteen to settle in Paris, and his grandfather Zacharias, once a fisherman in a small coastal village, who sees his traditional way of life turned upside down by a major logging company. A spellbinding fresco where tradition, modernity and the trauma of exile collide. A novel of love and transmission.