A Swiss prize winner and shepherd brings her novel of inherited trauma into French
Asa Hendry, who raises cattle in the Grisons mountains and writes between seasons, has won the 2026 Prix suisse de littérature for "Archive." The book appears in French translation this week from Editions Métropolis.
Asa Hendry was born in 1999 in Val Lumnezia, in the canton of Grisons, and spends part of the year herding cattle in the mountains before returning to writing. According to Le Temps, she met the paper at a lakeside hotel in Morges, having just come down from two months at altitude: "Nous sommes deux bergers à nous occuper de 230 génisses. Quelqu'un me remplace en ce moment," she said, meaning someone is covering for her with the herd while she tours for the book.
Hendry studied theater and gender studies in Bern, then in Giessen, Germany. On social media she describes herself as a writer and cowboy, and told Le Temps she dislikes fixed categories, preferring that people use the neutral pronoun "iel" for her.
Her book "Archive" — its title, on the cover, mysteriously struck through — won the Prix suisse de littérature 2026. Le Temps describes it as a carnal, unconstrained text examining how a family trauma reverberates across two generations. The novel had its preview at the Livre sur les quais festival in Morges this past September; the French edition reaches bookshops this week, published by Editions Métropolis.
J'aimerais que la littérature nous guérisse.
Asa Hendry, to Le Temps
Sources
This article was written from these reports.