The December award this year goes to Maël Renouard for «La réforme de l'opéra de Beijing», published by Payot - Rivages, a captivating and particularly documented account of the Cultural Revolution and the artist’s condition in China. I am delighted that the jury has chosen this promising young 34-year-old author, a talented philosopher and essayist in whom gay knowledge combines with the greatest intellectual rigour.
«The reform of the Beijing opera» takes us behind the scenes of this venerable institution while dismantling the workings of a much more capricious and formidable machinery: that of politics, ideology and public taste. I wish a beautiful career as a writer to the one to whom the 15th December award, sponsored by Pierre Bergé, has just given his letters of nobility as a writer.