It was the novel The Perfect Circle, by Pascale Quiviger, which won the Hervé-Foulon prize on Wednesday evening, awarded during a ceremony at the Montreal Book Fair.

Each year, the Hervé-Foulon prize rewards a novel, a story or a collection of short stories published more than 10 years ago by a Quebec author in order to give a second life to this work. It comes with a $5,000 scholarship.

The Perfect Circle was published in 2003 by Editions de L’instant humaine. The jury, composed of Marie-Andrée Lamontagne, James Hyndman, Lise Bissonnette and Dominique Garand, described it as “a book of great beauty”.

“This very beautiful novel about the loss of oneself shows the finesse and accuracy of the inner states of a woman inhabited by a dizzying aspiration towards emptiness, but who never gives in to victimization or self-pity. A novel of pure interiority which offers a powerful dialogue between interior and exterior, one always echoing the other,” underlined the jury.

“I wrote The Perfect Circle after returning from a life-changing trip, in the hope of capturing the beauty and intensity of my encounter with Italy,” declared Pascale Quiviger. Looking back, I see that it is a very different text from those that followed it: it is my most intimate story. »

Pascale Quiviger was born in Montreal in 1969. After university studies in philosophy and visual arts, she settled in Italy where she taught drawing and painting for 10 years. After the birth of her daughter in 2008, she moved to the United Kingdom. She is the author of nine novels, an essay, an art book, a collection of short stories and a collection of poetry.