Laurent Mauvignier wins the Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, with a novel about absence in an deserted home | Culture | EUROtoday

This Tuesday, the author Laurent Movigner gained the 2025 Goncourt Prize, an important literary award in French literature, along with his ebook Empty homea novel constructed round an deserted household residence within the French countryside, the place the narrator returns after the demise of his mom. From that uninhabited area, the creator explores absence, time and the impossibility of repairing the previous. To date, the work has already achieved excellent opinions and gross sales outcomes, to which it now provides probably the most prestigious recognition.

The Goncourt Academy, the unique group of 10 those that grants the distinguished award every year, has awarded the creator of works equivalent to Men (2010), concerning the traumas of the Algerian conflict, and Night tales (2020), a monumental textual content that revisits the historical past of his household over 4 generations, guided by the questions which have tormented him since he was 16, the years of his father’s suicide.

Mauvigner has prevailed this time over the opposite three finalists. Caroline Lamarch, 70, aspired to the prize with The Beautiful Obscure; Emmanuel Carrère did it with Kolkhoze; and Nathacha Appanah, 52, with Night within the coronary heart. The latter, nonetheless, had gained the Fémina prize this week, and the Goncourt jury is reluctant to repeat it.

The energy of those lifetime, unpaid judges is immense. In Proust’s time, the prize, whose endowment got here from the inheritance of the brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt and which had been awarded since 1903, consisted of 5,000 francs. Today it’s a examine for 10 euros. Perhaps the ten euros with the best potential in literature. Because the actual prize is gross sales, which exceed 100,000 copies; translations into dozens of languages, movie variations. And the popularity. Since Proust, Malraux, Beauvoir, Modiano, Duras, Houellebecq, to ​​title a number of, have obtained it.

The peculiarity of the French awards – in comparison with awards in Spain such because the Planeta, and others – is that they aren’t organized by publishing corporations nor are they awarded to unpublished works, however to works revealed in the identical yr. There is transparency: readers can learn the books in competitors and know what to anticipate.

The creator of the work, as soon as consecrated, ensures tons of of hundreds of copies bought due to monumental media protection. According to the GfK cupboard, the Goncourt prize has bought a mean of 508,000 copies between 2018 and 2022, though this isn’t at all times the case. With a ebook bought for 20 euros, a gross sales degree like this implies a mean revenue of 1.1 million euros for the creator, in keeping with a calculation made in 2023 by The Echoesfor the reason that author solely finally retains between 8% and 15% of the sale value.