"Every November, leading figures of French literature gather in the upstairs room of an old-fashioned Paris restaurant and decide on the best novel of the year. The ceremony is staid, traditional, down to the restaurant's menu, full of classic dishes such as vol-au-vents and foie gras on toast. In pictures of the judging ceremony, the judges wear dark suits; each has four glasses of wine at hand."
"The winner of the Goncourt, as the prize is called, is likely to enter the pantheon of world literature, joining a lineage of writers that includes Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. The prize is also a financial boon for authors. As the biggest award in French literature, the Goncourt means a prime spot in storefronts, foreign rights, prestige. By one estimate, winning the Goncourt means nearly 1m of sales in the weeks that follow."
"In November 2024, the Academie Goncourt gave the prize to a novel by Kamel Daoud, a celebrated Algerian writer living in France. His victory came at a tense moment for France and its former colony. The relationship, never an easy one, had been strained by the Algerian state's increasing political repression of its people and French involvement in the dispute between Algeria and Morocco over Western Sahara."
The Goncourt ceremony is a ritualized November event held in an old-fashioned Paris restaurant, with judges wearing dark suits and classic French dishes served. Winning the Goncourt brings major prestige, prominent bookstore placement, foreign-rights interest and a surge in sales—often nearly one million copies in weeks after the award. In November 2024 the prize went to Kamel Daoud, whose win intersected with fraught Algeria–France relations marked by Algerian political repression and a diplomatic rift over Western Sahara. Gallimard faced exclusion from a book fair in Algiers amid suspicions linked to its publication of Daoud's controversial novel Houris.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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