The Society for French Studies is delighted to announce the award of the tenth annual R. H. Gapper Book Prize to Alain Viala for La France galante (Presses Universitaires de France).

The Society also commends the three further works shortlisted for the prize:


Celia Britton: The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool University Press)
Margaret McGowan: Dance in the Renaissance. European Fashion – French Obsession (Yale University Press)
Gavin Parkinson: Surrealism, Art and Modern Science (Yale University Press)

The award, which is for the best book published in 2008 by a scholar working in Britain or Ireland in French studies, is made by the Society for French Studies together with Mr Richard Gapper, representing the R. H. Gapper Charitable Trust, on the recommendation of a Prize Jury appointed by the SFS. The Prize Jury for 2009 was composed as follows:

The prize, which has a value of €25,000, has been awarded in support of the Foundation's work on the complete works of Voltaire.

The annual prize was created in 2007 to reward individuals or institutions which promote French as an international language.

Links to:

The Voltaire Foundation

Académie Française

The Modern Language Association of America has awarded its twentieth annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies to Frédérique Aït-Touati, of the University of Oxford, Saint John’s College, for her book Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, published by the University of Chicago Press. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that is written by a member of the association and that involves at least two literatures.

More information can be found here.