Madame Macron pens personal essay to The Queen’s Reading Room in celebration of Entente Littéraire
On Wednesday 4th December, Her Majesty The Queen and Madame Brigitte Macron gathered in front of literary figures from the UK and France to present the Entente Littéraire Prize to three new winners.
Launched by Her Majesty and Madame Macron in 2023, during Their Majesties’ State Visit to France, the Prize recognises books aimed at teenagers and young adults. It celebrates the pleasures of reading and the sharing of literary experiences between France and the UK.
The 2024 winners were named as Lucie Bryon for her graphic novel Thieves, Manon Steffan Ros for Le Livre Bleu de Nebo and Lise Garond for her translation into French of Le Livre Bleu de Nebo.
For the second year running, The Queen’s Reading Room was delighted to support the prize-giving, in the illustrious company of many of our featured authors including Peter James, Anthony Horowitz and Katherine Rundell.
The Queen’s Reading Room wishes to extend its gratitude to Madame Macron, who generously penned a personal essay especially for the charity in celebration of this years’ prize, all about the transformative power of books.
Message from The First Lady of France to The Queen’s Reading Room
Reading – whether of novels or of any other text – is, above all, an immense pleasure. It is a self-indulgent happiness that is always available to us: a room of one’s own.
Proust writes in a wonderful passage of how his childhood was made happy through books. Reading is the purest form of entertainment, allowing us to enter into a conversation with other times, other places and with the world around us. Through reading, the rules of time disappear.
Reading gives us the joy of escapism, just as Madame Bovary found on her travels with characters, with love stories and with Sultans who took her away from her Normandy. Some may say that this did her little good, since she came to live entirely in her novels and her real life could never match what she had experienced in fiction. But reading is freedom. And a library is the best remedy for melancholy.
Françoise Sagan prescribed literature to her friends who were plunged deep into grief, bereavement or heartbreak. She would recommend a particular novel for its healing power and for the consolation of words that speak to the wounds in our souls.
Reading novels also teaches us about universal feelings, allowing us to experience lives other than our own. Reading essays feeds ideas within us, leading us, and opening us, to other ways of seeing the world.
Reading is, finally, a secret weapon. In the modern world where everything is moving more and more quickly, where intelligence can be artificial, reading gives us authentic knowledge. Nothing is more precious, in this age of screens, both in our personal and our professional lives.
Happiness, comfort, creativity, knowledge… Apart from reading, very few activities offer such benefits. If certain books sometimes intimidate us, this can be overcome with perseverance.
Whoever we are, there is a novel, a collection of short stories, a comic, an essay or a book that is made for us.
The first chapters of a great novel speak to us of love, friendship, loss, grief, adventure, history and characters to fill our inner world.
The first lines of a philosophical essay make us think and make us grow.
Poems capture us with their beauty and stun us with their ability to express the inexpressible.
In the year of the Paris Olympics, the best training for body and soul and the happiest of sports – is reading.
Long live reading!
Long live readers of all ages and of all books!
Welcome to this world.