Tea Goncourt Prizeor Goncourt Prize, is France’s most prestigious literary award, just like America’s National Book Award and the UK’s Booker Prize. Previous Goncourt winners embrace Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, and Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano.
While there are Goncourt Prizes in a number of classes, like poetry and biography, an important is the one awarded to the perfect novel of the 12 months, referred to as merely the Goncourt Prize. It will get front-page therapy throughout the nation, and the profitable e book is assured to develop into a best-seller.
Some a long time in the past, a brand new class was added, the Goncourt Prize for High School Students (Goncourt Prize of High School Students). This award, chosen by hundreds of French excessive schoolers, proved so in style that 4 years in the past the academy created one other new class, for a novel chosen by inmates in France’s prisons.
The Inmate’s Award
Tea Goncourt Prize for Prisoners (Goncourt Prize of Inmates) is a joint effort of the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Justice, underneath the patronage of the Goncourt Academy. It is run by the National Book Centre, which says that the purpose is to “empower incarcerated individuals by making them active participants in a literary prize, valuing their critical abilities while also introducing them to contemporary literary works.”
France is a famously literate nation, with extra Nobel Prizes in Literature than another, so it isn’t stunning that this love of books extends to the nation’s jail inhabitants.
How it Works
Every September, the Goncourt Academy pronounces a listing of 15 books, from which it should choose the winner of the Goncourt Prize. These books then develop into the candidates for the inmates’ award.
The announcement of those 15 books kicks issues off. In 2025, the method was launched at Dijon’s Châteauroux jail, at an occasion hosted by Paule Constant, a member of the Goncourt Academy, and Mokhtar Amoudi, who gained the inmate’s award in 2023. After asserting the launch of the 12 months’s choice course of, these two took questions from the press and met with inmates who can be taking part.
Participation isn’t simple—all 15 books should learn over a interval of three months. Inmates meet weekly to debate them, evaluating parts like fashion, plot, and character improvement, then ranking them from one to 10. As one inmate put it, “We are making a literary choice, not a prisoner’s choice.”
Despite the rigor, this system has confirmed in style—over 600 inmates in 45 prisons participated in 2025. Perhaps this isn’t stunning, given the boredom and claustrophobia of jail life. As one inmate put it, “One reads to learn, but it is also a form of survival. It takes you outside the walls.” He went on to say, “I’m worried about leaving prison after 23 years, but I feel that reading has armed me intellectually.”
Authors make common visits to take part in these discussions—there have been over 30 of those visits final 12 months. These have an effect not solely on the inmates but in addition on the authors themselves. As Hélène Laurain notes, “The people I’ve met have a different relationship with reading. It’s not a pastime, it’s more than that. It’s essential and it creates an exchange of a rare intensity.”
Emmanuel Carrère concurs, saying, “I’ve made a number of prison visits. These meetings count much more than for people on the outside. More than the prize, what we do is vital.”
The Selection
After months of weekly discussions, the readers in every jail choose their prime three books, plus a delegate. These delegates then journey to 10 regional conferences, to debate the books with delegates of different prisons.
Many of the conferences happen in prisons, however not all—final 12 months’s assembly for the Paris space was held within the National Library. And as a result of each males’s and ladies’s prisons take part in this system, the regional conferences are sometimes blended.
The outcomes of the regional conferences are the identical as these of the person jail conferences—prime books are chosen, together with a delegate to signify the area. These ten regional delegates then journey to Paris for his or her closing assembly on the National Book Centre.
This takes place in December, the place the delegates meet behind closed doorways and, by way of dialogue and debate, select their winner. This is straight away introduced to the press and to the pleased winner, who then takes questions from each the reporters and the inmates.
Who gained?
In 2025, the Goncourt Prize for Prisoners was bestowed on The collisionby Paul Gasnier. Previous winners had been Madelaine earlier than daybreak by Sandrine Collette (2024), The superb circumstances by Mokhtar Amoudi (2023), and His favourite by Sarah Jollien-Fardel (2022).
Lead photograph credit score: Photo: National Book Center ©
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From Prison to Paris: France’s Inmates Bestow a Literary Award