(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Australian writer Lily Brett (pictured) yesterday won France's Prix Medicis literary award for best foreign book for Lola Bensky, a novel drawing on her experience both as a 1960s rock journalist and the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
Brett's sixth novel tells the story of an eponymous heroine who arrives in London in 1967 and proceeds to interview the biggest names in music from Mick Jagger to Jimi Hendrix.
Soon, however, she starts to wonder if the questions she is asking are in fact substitutes for questions about her parents' past.
Brett said that, like her character Lola, she too had been sent to London as a rock journalist in 1967. She was able to get close to many of the stars, she said, adding that it was a conversation with Jimi Hendrix that provided the idea for the book.
"I was sitting in Mick Jagger's apartment... discussing hair curls with Jimi Hendrix," she said.
"We both had very curly hair. His much more curly than mine and that led to the basis of Lola Bensky," she said.
Brett's Jewish parents, Max and Rose, were both sent to Auschwitz during World War II. Both lost their entire families in the conflict.
The winner of the Prix Medicis's main category, meanwhile, was French author Antoine Volodine, for Terminus Radieux (Radiant Terminus), set in Siberia in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster.
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