The Prix Goncourt did not have a brilliant start that year. The most important French book award is symbolically endowed with only ten euros, but is considered a direct elevator to the bestseller lists. The international publishers are also lining up. The novel “Anomalie” by Hervé Le Tellier, which was awarded in 2020, is one of the great successes of the “Rentrée Litteraire”, the annual French book spectacle in late autumn, with around one million copies sold in France alone. The book is currently also on the German bestseller list.
This year there was a scandal in advance when Camille Laurens, one of the big ten, perhaps the most important opinion-maker in the French literary world, as juror for the Goncourt Prize, wrote in the daily newspaper Le Monde had made devastating comments about a book while it was on the longlist of the award. Since her husband, François Noudelmann, was also on this longlist and was therefore a contender for the award, Camille Laurens’ literary critical intervention had an unpleasant aftertaste. As a consequence, the Académie Goncourt, which has been awarding the prize since 1903, reconsidered its guidelines. Life partners of jury members are now, according to the realignment, excluded from the application in advance.
Despite the bad weather, the Goncourt Prize winner was chosen this Monday. The Senegalese-French writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr was honored with his novel “La plus secrète mémoire des hommes” (Philippe Rey / Jimsaan publishing house), the title of which can be translated as “The most secret memory of mankind”.
In France, Sarr has already received several awards for his novels
At just 31 years of age, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is possibly the youngest recipient in the long history of this award, but not the least known. He has received numerous prizes in France for his novels, and by now at the latest he will also become known on a broader European stage. It is also a novelty that the award winner is represented by two publishing houses, the French Philippe Rey and the Senegalese Jimsaan.
“La plus secrète mémoire des hommes” is Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s fourth novel; it was considered one of the most aesthetically demanding texts among the four nominated works. At the center of the story is a Senegalese writer who comes across a book by a mysterious author who has disappeared from the 1930s in France and then goes in search of his inspiration, crossing different eras and national borders. With this novel, as Sarr described it in an interview, he wanted to show that literature has just as much to do with life as it does with history. He seems to have succeeded in this endeavor.