France's top literary prize, the Goncourt, was awarded Tuesday to writer Laurent Mauvignier for a 750-page family saga spanning more than a century.
"I'm overjoyed," Mauvignier said as he received the prize.
It's "a huge reward because it's a book that comes from my childhood and spans several generations."
The jury only needed one round of voting to select the 58-year-old author for La maison vide (The empty house), an opus inspired by stories about his father's family that he heard while growing up.
Mauvignier had been vying for the Goncourt against fellow French writer and scriptwriter Emmanuel Carrere, Mauritian-French writer Nathacha Appanah, and Belgian author Caroline Lamarche.
"We are honouring an author who already has a very important body of work behind him and who, this year, has given us not a collection, but a novel that is nonetheless fundamental," said Philippe Claudel, president of the Académie Goncourt.
Like the other members of the jury, he wore a badge in support of the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, imprisoned in Algeria since November 2024.
Last year, the prize was awarded to Houris by the Franco-Algerian Kamel Daoud.
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According to a century-old tradition, the Goncourt winner was revealed at lunchtime at the Drouant restaurant in central Paris. The prize money is a cheque of 10 euros that winners usually prefer framing on the wall rather than cashing in.
As well as prestige, the award guarantees a boost in sales. According to the European research institute GfK, between 2019 and 2023, the Prix Goncourt sold an average of 577,000 copies in France in the year the prize was awarded.
Family history
Mauvignier was born in Touraine into a working-class family. After studying fine arts in Tours, he turned to literature.
His 750-page-novel The empty house recounts the successive generations since the beginning of the 20th century in La Bassée, an imaginary village in Touraine that resembles the small town where the author grew up.
"I think my family history is similar to that of millions of French people, with its dark moments and its more glorious ones," Laurent Mauvignier told French news agency AFP.
"After two or three generations, memories are lost. And once that thread is cut, it's completely over."
Women play a central role in the story because "they are the ones who hold things together, as was often the case in the countryside and in times of war."
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Mauvignier's previous books translated into English include a thriller set in rural France called The Birthday Party.
He also wrote The Wound, a novel exploring the legacy of the Algerian war of independence, and In the Crowd, set in the runup to the 1985 football fan crush at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium that killed 39 people.
Immediately after the Goncourt, the Renaudot jury announced its 2023 literary prize which went to novelist Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre for Je voulais vivre (I wanted to live).
(with AFP)
