Pascale Kramer recounts "characters who push her"

Pascale Kramer, the Geneva novelist based in Paris, received the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for Literature in Bern on Thursday. In her books, 13 so far, the 55-year-old author tells the fate of simple people who often have lost hope. The prize for her body of work gives her confidence to get through a recent period of doubt, she confides. If she were a painter, she would be a Mannerist. Kramer proposes, in each of her novels, a language which, with a lot of specificity, identifies the slightest gestures, movements and jolts of the heart. However, her pen never uses traditional or affected accents. The Swiss Federal Office of Culture (OFC), in awarding her the Swiss Grand Prix, said of her writing that it is "precise and sumptuous (...) a song of emotion, but with a great lucidity about the humanity of simple people. " Kramer never ceases to explore the lives of simple people in her books. It is to them that her attention and affection is directed. Her characters know ...