The Franco-Moroccan author Zineb Mekouar is the winner of the thirteenth edition of the Folire Prize, which rewards her second novel “Remember bees” (ed. Gallimard). The delivery of this distinction is scheduled for Monday, June 2, 2025, at the amphitheater of the Thuir hospital center, in the Occitanie region. Announcing this consecration, the novelist said herself “immensely moved”, especially since it is “the first and only price granted by people suffering from psychiatric disorders, on the initiative of the hospital center”.
“I had the incredible chance of making upsetting meetings on the occasion of this selection. I am extremely grateful and moved. Mental health is of capital importance in our intimacies and to live it together. Let’s talk about it, let’s put it forward and celebrate literature which shows, every day, that it is the cracks that let the light pass ”, wrote Zineb Mekouar on his social networks.
Released in 2024“Remember bees” highlights Anir, a ten-year-old child. He “loves the eagles that make large circles near the clouds and the stories told to him by his grandfather, especially those concerning the apiary of the saint-the oldest collective apiary in the world-perched on a mountain side of the High Atlas”. The little boy, “under the overwhelming heat of southern Morocco, will learn to take care of bees and love this red, arid, increasingly silent earth”. But the legends of his village and the haunting lullaby of his mother hide a heavy family secret.
Delivering a deep account and told over the water with great empathy, Zineb Mekouar here addresses themes related to human rights, with global dimensions, at children’s height and protruding news. The reader is brought to a reflection on the environment, climate change, questions of exploitation in extreme precariousness, as well as the generational leg of collective goods in time of loss of ecosystems. To do this, the novelist has chosen to anchor her fictitious story in the real space of the apadir apiary, a site supported by Morocco for a UNESCO ranking.
In his first opus, “the hen and his cumin” (ed. Jc. Lattès), the novelist dealt with the question of individual freedoms, emancipation and social injunctions, relationship to body and equality. In this second, it covers in particular the dimensions of the vulnerability of the youngest, among other stigmata which illustrate the accumulated consequences of poverty.
Created in 2011, the Folire Prize is the fruit of a partnership between the Mediterranean Center for Literature and the Thuir Hospital Center. Its objective is to “allow people with psychiatric disorders to crown the literary quality of a story or a novel by a French -speaking author”.
