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US author Jonathan Littell wins France's Goncourt book prize

Thursday, 23 November 2006

US author Jonathan Littell wins France's Goncourt book prize

American author Jonathan Littell, 39, has won the French Goncourt literary prize with Les Bienveillantes, his controversial first novel about the life of a fictional SS officer.

Les Bienveillantes is written in French and is currently the number one bestseller in France, where the author grew up.

Les Bienveillantes is the story of an unrepentant SS officer who is recalling the extermination of the Jews in World War II but it has been criticised for being inaccurate and historian Peter Shoettler branded it a "strange, monstrous book" that failed to tell the true story of the Holocaust.

The Goncourt jury said Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) was much better than works by French authors and won the panel's vote by 7-3.

Bi-lingual Jonathan Littell, the son of American journalist and author Robert Littell, is said to have written the book in French in tribute to the authors Stendhal and Flaubert.

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