We are at the heart of a wave, that of literary prizes, generally awarded in this autumn period, including the day before yesterday the Goncourt Lorraine, or Erckmann-Chatrian prize, whose winner for its 93rd edition is Arnaud Dudek for ” The back heart” (Les Avrils editions). France is really the country of literary prizes, I have listed more than 180 including some from Lorraine, Erckmann-Chatrian but also the Imaginales prize (Epinal), Amérigo Vespucci prize (Saint-Dié) or booksellers prize (Nancy) . There are of course the behemoths: Goncourt, Renaudot, Médicis, Interallié… You also have to reckon with some more wacky or funny prices, such as the price for page 111 (you have been warned, take care of your page 111, it’s the one that will be judged and if you win, you pocket 111 euro cents in 1 cent coins), the price of the SNCF (which does not mean that you arrived late at the publisher, nor that you have writes your thriller on the train) or the price sent by post (the manuscript must actually be sent by post, which does not mean that it will arrive on time but that it has simply arrived by post, no specific recommendation).
Does this imply that in the pitiless universe of literary prizes, nudges exist, or even piston strokes? The rumor is persistent. You know the mocking formula “Galligrasseuil”, meaning that the Gallimard, Grasset and Le Seuil publishing houses take the lion’s share of literary prizes. To be serious and go from rumor to news, I went snooping on studies, in particular one from Le Monde in 2017. Result of the races: it’s not quite true if we take all the prices, but it’s still not far from the truth if we stop at the big prices, there is clearly a domination of these three publishing houses. Unquestionably, the grand prize, the holy grail for a writer, is the Goncourt. It is also the one whose winners are often the subject of controversy. Example with the Lorrain André Schwartz-Bart, one of the three Lorrainers with Jean Vautrin and Nicolas Mathieu to have received the Goncourt. In 1959, he was favorite for the Goncourt prize, he was then accused by a literary critic of plagiarism; but it seems that this critic had another darling in mind, a certain Antoine Blondin and that he had therefore used this unfair method to discredit André Schwartz-Bart who was indeed the winner. Blondin, he received the Interallié prize for a formidable novel, which would also have deserved the Goncourt: “A monkey in winter”.