Duras Novel of Love Affair at 15 Wins Hemingway Award

PARIS —  Marguerite Duras won the $50,000 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award today for “L’Amant,” her intense, lyric novel about the love affair she had with a wealthy Chinese when she was 15 years old in French Indochina.

Duras, 72, said the Hemingway prize meant more to her than the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award that she won two years ago, because of its American connections and her “secret passion” for Hemingway.

Duras, a left-wing writer of novels, stage and screen plays, is best known for her 1959 classic “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Today, she said, “I am totally for the policies of (President) Reagan. He knows the totalitarianism and the terrorism of the Soviet Union.”