Literary prize

EXCERPTS FROM THE SPEECH OF AUTHOR PAULO COELHO

Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris

As a writer, when Fabrice Boé, the CEO of Prisma Presse, told me about the idea of this Literary Prize, I was really happy… because the reader, is the only one who can promote or break a literary work. And this concept of readers making the decision, is the best by far. Because juries can sometimes get a bit lost in issues of style, they end up being a little bureaucratic in their approach to judging writing. I thought the idea was great… We received 500 manuscripts, which we sent to over 300 readers…

ONCE UPON A TIME…

I am not an award-conscious person but I am very proud of this Prize because it really is different.

Once upon a time … a publisher and the big boss of a large press group, Fabrice Boe, a talented and visionary man (who was one of the first to bring together the employees of the group’s 16 magazines in one ecological building that he had built long before everyone started talking about ecology). One day, they had the idea of creating a new kind of literary Grand Prix that does not exist anywhere else: A prize whose members of the jury are not limited to a small committee, but which would be composed of members of the general public, booklovers one and all, who would not know each other and who would receive anonymized manuscripts by mail (without any information about the author, such as name or gender, etc.). Just like Paulo Coelho, I found that really great because it was the only guarantee of a healthy and total impartiality, exactly like a blind winetasting: the public would therefore choose the texts they liked best, without any interference, publicity or influence and would discover, subsequently, who had written them.

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They contacted a star writer, Paulo Coelho, music lyricist and world famous author, distributed in more than 150 countries and translated into more than 80 languages, who agreed to be both the mentor of this new kind of Prize, and the President of this public grand jury (several hundred people) with a little more than 300 manuscripts, as he explains himself briefly in the video above. The assessment sheets were then sent back to the editor responsible for sorting and assembling them.

To arrive in first place – unanimously at that – was both a great surprise and a great joy. Less for the Prize itself than for what it meant: the fact of having known how to reach the hearts of the public.

In addition to being a “full-scale” test, it’s therefore like getting my very own Golden Globe 😉 !

And this was confirmed by the comments received via my website when the second novel was released.

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A year after the first novel was published, the press group was bought up by a larger one and the new boss had no interest in book publishing, he was totally focused on the magazine business. Sadly, neither Paulo Coelho nor I agreed with his plans for the company and so we parted ways with this publishing house.

I then focused on writing the second Part of The Genesis Protocol, a complex work requiring a lot of planning and research.

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That is the reason why my publications were delayed in the short-term but I’m looking forward to presenting you my new creations soon!

SPECIAL MOMENTS WITH PAULO COELHO…

He is a warm person, very charismatic and endowed with an almost palpable magnetism. I really enjoyed meeting with him. We got along very well immediately, and there was great complicity between us.

He gave me some precious advice …