English Speaker is First to Win French Literary Prize

A US author has made history by becoming the first native English speaker to win France's most coveted literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes has already notched up sales of 250,000, transfixing readers with the fictional memoirs of a Nazi murderer.

More impressively the 39-year-old writer has won near unanimous praise from French critics, who have hailed him as a literary phenomenon. But the 900-page blockbuster has also attracted sniping from intellectuals, who accuse the New York-born writer of being voyeuristic and tasteless.

Les Bienveillantes, or the Kindly Ones, is a first-person account of the Nazis' murderous campaign in eastern Europe as told by a fictitious former SS officer, Maximilian Aue. Aue tells of his role in the Nazi butchery from the comfort of his bourgeois home in suburban France.

His unapologetic narrative is filled with gruesome, blood-soaked accounts of the mass executions that he helped to supervise and vivid depictions of life on the eastern front.

The scenes in Auschwitz and in Hitler's bunker have outraged historians and Jewish community figures, who have labelled Littell's novel as "Holocaust pornography".

But controversy and criticism have not harmed sales or Littell's profile. His epic came to the fore last month when it won the grand prix of the Académie Française, the guardian of the French language, and the book is now set to enter its 15th edition with another run of 150,000.

Littell who has lived in France, but now resides in Barcelona, has said that he wrote the book in French as a tribute to two of his favourite authors, Gustave Flaubert and Stendhal.

He spent five years researching and writing the book after witnessing war in Bosnia, Chechnya and Congo while working for Action Against Hunger, a French charity.

Winning the 103-year-old Prix Goncourt guarantees literary acclaim and commercial success. Past recipients include Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras.

The English translation of Les Bienveillantes is to be published in the United States in 2008 by HarperCollins, which won the rights to the book in a protracted bidding war.