International
Moroccan Novelist Zineb Mekouar Wins Prestigious French Literary Prize for “Remember the Bees”
Moroccan author Zineb Mekouar has been awarded the prestigious ‘Prix Henri de Régnier’ from the Académie française for her novel ‘Souviens-toi des abeilles’. The book, which poetically addresses climate change and ancestral wisdom, has garnered significant acclaim in France.
On Thursday in Paris, the Moroccan novelist Zineb Mekouar was awarded the Académie française’s Prix Henri de Régnier for the support of literary creation, in recognition of her second novel, Souviens-toi des abeilles (Remember the Bees), published by Gallimard.
During a solemn public ceremony dedicated to literary prizes, presided over by the Perpetual Secretary of the Académie française, Amin Maalouf, the young author received this prestigious distinction to the applause of the Academicians and the audience.
In presenting the award-winning work, Dominique Bona, the current Director of the Académie française, praised a novel about “transmission, the enchantment of nature, and wounded love which moved us.”
She added that “its simple, subtle writing impressed us,” recounting the story of a young boy, confronted too early with tragedy, who receives ancestral knowledge from his grandfather in a village in southern Morocco that is “home to the oldest beehive in the world.”
Beyond its literary merit, Zineb Mekouar’s Souviens-toi des abeilles is already meeting with success in France, where readers are struck by the author’s unique poetic approach, which gently and delicately addresses the issue of climate change.
The novel was notably included among the Académie Goncourt’s “Summer 2024 Favorites” and on the first selection list for the 2024 Prix Jean Giono. It has also received the 2025 Prix Folire, which highlights the importance of mental health in community life.
Zineb Mekouar was born in Casablanca in 1991 and has lived in Paris since 2009. Her first novel, La poule et son cumin (The Hen and Its Cumin, JC Lattès, 2022), was a finalist for the 2022 Goncourt Prize for First Novel and was also listed among the Académie Goncourt’s “Summer 2022 Favorites.”
SOURCE: ATLAS INFO.FR
