Felicitations to JOHN BOYNE on being awarded the Fnac Novel Prize 2025 for THE ELEMENTS – published by JC Lattès and translated by Sophie Aslanides. He succeeds Marie Vingtras, who won in 2024 for Les âmes féroces.
Since 2002, the Fnac Novel Prize has been awarded by a unique jury made up of 400 Fnac booksellers and 400 members. This year, their choice fell on John Boyne, once again honoring a foreign author in the winners’ circle, five years after Tiffany McDaniel and her unforgettable Betty (2020). This choice illustrates once more the Prize’s mission: to celebrate the diversity of contemporary literary creation, whether Francophone or translated.
In The Elements, John Boyne explores, through four interwoven stories, the invisible forces that shape lives and questions our relationship to guilt and innocence, to wounds and resilience. With limpid and spellbinding prose, Boyne probes the elements — water, earth, fire, and air — and human beings to reveal their contradictions and fragilities.