Hatzfeld Wins the Kapuściński Award

Jean Hatzfeld – author of "The Antelope's Strategy" – has been named the first winner of the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for literary reportage. "This is a book about a difficult unification after the bloody civil war in Rwanda,” said the head of the award jury, Małgorzata Szejnert.

"The Antelope's Strategy" is Hatzfeld’s third book on the Rwanda civil war, during which over a million members of a Rwanda minority, the Tutsi, died at the hands of the Hutu in 1994; the killers and victims had often been neighbors prior to the massacre.

In the two first books, which have not been translated into Polish, "Dans le nu de la vie. Recits des marais rwandais" and "Une saison de machettes," the author gives the floor to the killers and their victims, unveiling a world of inconceivable cruelty before the reader. He describes the stories of the residents of a particular village, Nyamata. Its residents try to describe their present lives, twelve years after the genocide.

In "The Antelope's Strategy" Hatzfeld returns to Rwanda to talk once more with people from other side, after some of the Hutu were released from prison or returned from exile in the Congo. The Tutsi have had to take their neighbors in once more.

"How do they deal with reconciliation? Is real forgiveness possible? Does reconciliation mean betrayal of the victims of the crime? These are just some of Hatzfeld’s questions. In the mini-narrative convention he adopts, he is faithful to his informers – this means that we almost see their faces, hear their voices, we learn how they think," said the head of the jury, Małgorzata Szejnert.

Jean Hatzfeld received a check for 50,000 zł. on Sunday evening, and the translator, Jacek Griszczak, received one for 15,000 zł.

The distinction established by the capital city of Warsaw and "Gazeta Wyborcza" aims to award the finest books of reportage published in a given year, as well as their translators. The jury, headed by journalist and writer Małgorzata Szejnert (it also included cultural anthropologist Joanna Bator, writer and literary critic Iwona Smolka, director and stage designer Maciej Drygas, and Swedish translator of Polish literature, Slavic and Romance cultures scholar Anders Bodegard) selected from among 50 submitted books – 38 by Polish authors and 12 foreign ones.

The award winner – Jean Hatzfeld (born 1949) – was for many years a correspondent for "Liberation." He described the development of the "Solidarity" movement in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the regime of Ceauescu. He spent three years in the former Yugoslavia, and was wounded during some shooting in Sarajevo. In 1994 he set off for Rwanda. He received the 2007 Prix Medicis for "The Antelope's Strategy."

Jacek Giszczak (born in 1956) graduated in Polish Philology from the Catholic University of Lublin and in literature from the Sorbonne. In recent years he has specialized in translations of black Francophone literature, including such writers as Ken Bugul, Dany Laferriere and Lyonel Trouillot.

"The Antelope's Strategy" appeared in Poland through Czarne Publishers.