The jury honored the 32-year-old author for his superb adaptation. A project he had nurtured since he was fifteen.
An adaptation of the famous anticipation novel 1984 by George Orwell, signed Xavier Coste (Sarbacane editions) received the Fnac France Inter comic book prize on Thursday. The jury said in a press release that it won “an adaptation to the terrifying evocative power in which Xavier Coste manages to give to a monument of literature images as strong as Orwell’s words“.
Read alsothe 1984 d’Orwell magnified by Xavier Coste
After having distinguished himself in different registers, between a biography of Egon Schiele and Arthur Rimbaud, the story of a heist of the century or the exploration of the drifts of science, Xavier Coste, now in his thirties, can be boast of having successfully completed this lifelong project. Since the age of fifteen, he has had the idea of adapting this novel into a comic strip: “For me 1984 will remain the most important book, I made it by telling myself that it would perhaps be my last comic strip, having the feeling of having given everything ”, declared the author to Figaro , last January.
By tackling 1984, which depicts a Europe under the thumb of the totalitarian regime of an omnipresent leader, “Big Brother”, he also faced bloated competition in bookstores in 2021. Grasset published the version of the Brazilian Fido Nesti. Jean-Christophe Derrien and Rémi Torregrossa signed another with Soleil (Delcourt group). And Sybille Titeux de la Croix and Ameziane Hammouche have proposed their adaptation to the editions of the Rocher. The latter two, with Xavier Coste, took advantage of the arrival of the British writer’s work in the public domain.
Released in January 2021, Xavier Coste’s album, elected by a jury of booksellers and journalists, will be featured in Fnac stores.