French author Brigitte Giraud won the Goncourt, the most prestigious of French-speaking literary prizes, on Thursday with live fastpublished by Flammarion, a return to the spiral of improbable events that led to the death of her husband.
She is the first author to receive this award since Soft song by Leïla Slimani in 2016, and the 13e woman rewarded since the creation of Goncourt 120 years ago.
Brigitte Giraud won at 14e round of a very tight ballot against Giuliano da Empoli, thanks to the vote of the president of the Goncourt academy Didier Decoin who counts double. She succeeds the Senegalese Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.
The Académie Goncourt has chosen an author little known to the general public and not accustomed to large sales figures, thus pursuing a certain revival.
Native of Algeria, Brigitte Giraud, who lives in Lyon (central-eastern France), has written about ten books, novels, essays or short stories.
She obtained the Goncourt for short stories in 2007 for the collection Love is very overrated. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Prix Médicis for brave day.
By choosing live fastthe Goncourt jurors choose a sober and sensitive story, which was immediately well received by critics.
The author is inspired by the drama of her life, on June 22, 1999 in Lyon, when her husband Claude starts too quickly at a traffic light, with an overly powerful motorcycle which is not his, and falls. He won’t recover.
Long-time favorite Giuliano da Empoli, 49, who posted in April The Mage of the Kremlin (Gallimard editions), will ultimately have to settle for the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, which he won at the end of October.
Again present in the final, the flourishing Haitian literature once again sees the Goncourt, Makenzy Orcel (A human sum at Rivages) failing to establish itself.
No more than Cloé Korman, author and pen of the speeches of the French Minister of National Education, Pap Ndiaye, who would compete with The Almost Sisterspublished by Seuil.
For his part, the Renaudot prize – awarded just after the Goncourt in the same Parisian restaurant – was awarded to Simon Liberati for Performanceabout a septuagenarian writer who reconnects with the holy fire by writing a script about the Rolling Stones, and has a relationship with a woman almost 50 years younger than him.
He obtained six votes among the members of the jury.
Literary prizes, which often inspire those wishing to discover or offer a novel at the end of the year, are a crucial economic issue. Le Goncourt in particular guarantees hundreds of thousands of sales.
And as tradition dictates, Brigitte Giraud also leaves with a check for ten euros, which the beneficiaries in general prefer to frame rather than deposit it in the bank.