Collection of the Winning Pastiches from the 2025 Competition

Proust himself excelled at the exercise: his L'Affaire Lemoine pastiches, gathered in 1919 in Pastiches et Mélanges, testify to an early taste for the art of slipping into another's style. The Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray perpetuates this literary game through an annual competition, of which this collection gathers the five texts awarded prizes at the seventh edition.

Overview

Thirteen pastiches were submitted for this 2025 edition of the competition, in two categories: general and "under twenty-five." The collection brings together the five winning texts, preceded by an introduction retracing the tradition of pastiche in Proust — from the parody of the Journal des Goncourt in Time Regained to the more recent reworkings by Marc Lambron and Jacques Drillon — and followed by the competition's complete rules.

The award-winning texts move the Proustian sentence toward contemporary subjects: a cathedral visit spun into a meditation on art, a public reading that turns into a collective outpouring of emotion, a romance scam carried out on a dating app, an encounter between masked patients during an epidemic, or a sleepless night devoted to writing. Each pastiche seeks to recreate, through syntax and rhythm, the illusion of a page that might have come from the author's own pen.

Authors and Contributors

Claire Leibovich, First Prize in the general category, for La Bible de Sens.

Rémy Clivaz, Second Prize in the general category, for Une lecture de haut vol.

Philippe Morel, Members' Prize in the general category, for À la recherche de l'homme des Laumes.

Maël Le Garff, First Prize and Members' Prize in the under-twenty-five category, for Le visage d'Alfred.

Benjamin Green, Second Prize in the under-twenty-five category, for Juvenilia.

Éric Unger edited the collection.

The jury, in alphabetical order, was composed of Jérôme Bastianelli, Élyane Dezon-Jones, Emily Eells, Anne Imbert, Isabelle Serça and Éric Unger.

Contents

• Introduction
• General Category
  • 1st Prize: La Bible de Sens, by Claire Leibovich
  • 2nd Prize: Une lecture de haut vol, by Rémy Clivaz
  • Members' Prize: À la recherche de l'homme des Laumes, by Philippe Morel
• Under-Twenty-Five Category
  • 1st Prize & Members' Prize: Le visage d'Alfred, by Maël Le Garff
  • 2nd Prize: Juvenilia, by Benjamin Green
• Jury Members
• Competition Rules

Bibliographic Information

• Format: paperback, 62 pages
• ISBN: 978-2-492318-30-6
• Legal deposit: September 2025
• Publisher: Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray