Prix Goncourt Winners: The Complete List and the Books to Read in English

On the walls of a good many French studies hangs a cheque that was never cashed. It is made out for ten euros, it is signed by the Académie Goncourt, and by custom the writer who receives it has it framed rather than banked, because its value lies entirely elsewhere. The money is a joke the prize has been telling for more than a century; the real reward arrives the next morning, when a red paper band reading “Prix Goncourt” is wrapped around the winning novel and the book begins to sell in the hundreds of thousands. No literary honor anywhere converts prestige into readers so quickly, and none has been argued over for so long.

This page holds the complete record of Prix Goncourt winners, from John-Antoine Nau in 1903 to Philippe Jaenada in 2026, together with the story of how the prize works, the verdicts that made it famous and infamous, and the winners most worth an English reader’s time. The list below marks which have reached English, and under what titles. The 2026 laureate was announced on Tuesday 3 November, and our Prix Goncourt 2026 report carries that result and the four finalists. For the wider landscape of honors this prize belongs to, see our guide to the most prestigious literary awards.

What the Prix Goncourt Is

The Goncourt, the oldest and most coveted literary prize in France, began as a fraternal ambition. In 1862 the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, novelists, diarists and collectors, resolved that after their deaths their estate would fund an academy of ten writers in their name, a deliberate rival to the Académie française, which had never admitted them. Jules died in 1870. Edmond set the plan down in a will deposited with his notary in 1892, and when he died in 1896 his family contested it. The lawsuit, in which the future president Raymond Poincaré argued for the writers, was won in 1900; the society adopted its statutes in 1902, received official recognition by decree in January 1903, and awarded its first prize on 21 December 1903, to John-Antoine Nau, a Franco-American poet and novelist, for Force ennemie.

The will defined the prize with admirable economy: it was to reward the best “work of imagination in prose” published in the year. In practice that has almost always meant a novel. The original award was five thousand gold francs, enough to free a young writer for a year; inflation has worn it down to the symbolic ten euros, and the prize’s value now lies in the sales it produces. Hervé Le Tellier’s L’Anomalie, the 2020 winner, passed a million copies in less than a year, and French press estimates put a publisher’s gain from a Goncourt in the millions of euros within weeks of the announcement.

The ten members, chosen for life by the others, are not paid. What each receives instead is a couvert, a place at the table at Drouant, the restaurant near the Opéra where the academy has met for more than a century, with a set of silver-gilt cutlery engraved with the member’s name.

How the Goncourt Is Chosen

The prize unfolds across the French literary season known as the rentrée. In early September the academy names a first selection of about fifteen novels from the year’s books; in October it cuts the list to eight, then to four finalists; and in the first days of November, traditionally on a Tuesday, the jury meets upstairs at Drouant to vote. Each member votes aloud. An absolute majority is needed in the early rounds, a simple majority suffices from the tenth, and if fourteen rounds produce no winner the president’s vote counts double. The name is then announced to the journalists crowded at the foot of the staircase, and the Prix Renaudot, founded in 1926 by critics who were waiting for the Goncourt result, is announced moments later in the same room.

One rule has shaped the prize’s character more than any other: a writer may win it only once. A younger offshoot, the Goncourt des lycéens, created in 1988, lets some two thousand French secondary-school students choose their own winner from the academy’s first selection. Abroad, a network of “Choix Goncourt” prizes lets university students in more than a dozen countries, among them Poland since 1998, the United Kingdom since 2019, and the United States more recently, pick their own laureate from the same list.

The Most Recent Winner

The 2026 Prix Goncourt was awarded on 3 November to Philippe Jaenada for L’Inconnue du quai de Javel, published by Flammarion, by six votes to three over Sylvain Prudhomme’s De l’autre côté du lac. The book, some five hundred pages long, returns to a Paris death the police allowed to go cold: in September 1949 a young woman, one of the best-known models of Montparnasse, was found in the Seine at the quai de Javel, four suspects came and went, and the file was closed for want of evidence, and Jaenada’s argument, pursued with his customary digressive patience, is that a forgotten victim is owed the inquiry her own century refused her. Jaenada, who won the Prix Femina in 2017 for La Serpe, has spent two decades making old French criminal cases into a form of his own, half investigation and half confession, and this verdict honors the method as much as the book. No English translation or English-language rights had been announced on the day of the award.

Its two predecessors show the prize’s range. Laurent Mauvignier’s La Maison vide (The Empty House, 2025), a family saga of some seven hundred and fifty pages from Éditions de Minuit, won on the first ballot and has sold more than six hundred thousand copies in France; an American translation has been described as forthcoming. Kamel Daoud’s Houris (2024), narrated by a young woman left mute by a wound from Algeria’s civil war of the 1990s, cannot be published in Algeria, and in April 2026 Daoud said an Algerian court had sentenced him in his absence to three years in prison. Neither book had appeared in English by November 2026. This section is updated each November.

The Complete List of Prix Goncourt Winners

The record below runs from the most recent year back to the first. Where a book has been published in English, the English title follows in brackets; where no English title is given, no translation is known to us. The 2026 winner was announced on 3 November 2026, and our 2026 Goncourt report covers the vote and the four finalists.

2020s

• 2026: L’Inconnue du quai de Javel, Philippe Jaenada (not yet published in English)
• 2025: La Maison vide, Laurent Mauvignier (not yet published in English)
• 2024: Houris, Kamel Daoud (not yet published in English)
• 2023: Veiller sur elle, Jean-Baptiste Andrea (English: Watching Over Her)
• 2022: Vivre vite, Brigitte Giraud (English: Live Fast)
• 2021: La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (English: The Most Secret Memory of Men)
• 2020: L’Anomalie, Hervé Le Tellier (English: The Anomaly)

2010s

• 2019: Tous les hommes n’habitent pas le monde de la même façon, Jean-Paul Dubois (English: Not Everybody Lives the Same Way)
• 2018: Leurs enfants après eux, Nicolas Mathieu (English: And Their Children After Them)
• 2017: L’Ordre du jour, Éric Vuillard (English: The Order of the Day)
• 2016: Chanson douce, Leïla Slimani (English: Lullaby; US: The Perfect Nanny)
• 2015: Boussole, Mathias Énard (English: Compass)
• 2014: Pas pleurer, Lydie Salvayre (English: Cry, Mother Spain)
• 2013: Au revoir là-haut, Pierre Lemaitre (English: The Great Swindle)
• 2012: Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome, Jérôme Ferrari (English: The Sermon on the Fall of Rome)
• 2011: L’Art français de la guerre, Alexis Jenni (English: The French Art of War)
• 2010: La Carte et le Territoire, Michel Houellebecq (English: The Map and the Territory)

2000s

• 2009: Trois femmes puissantes, Marie NDiaye (English: Three Strong Women)
• 2008: Syngué sabour. Pierre de patience, Atiq Rahimi (English: The Patience Stone)
• 2007: Alabama Song, Gilles Leroy
• 2006: Les Bienveillantes, Jonathan Littell (English: The Kindly Ones)
• 2005: Trois jours chez ma mère, François Weyergans
• 2004: Le Soleil des Scorta, Laurent Gaudé (English: The House of Scorta)
• 2003: La Maîtresse de Brecht, Jacques-Pierre Amette (English: Brecht’s Mistress)
• 2002: Les Ombres errantes, Pascal Quignard (English: The Roving Shadows)
• 2001: Rouge Brésil, Jean-Christophe Rufin (English: Brazil Red)
• 2000: Ingrid Caven, Jean-Jacques Schuhl (English: Ingrid Caven)

1990s

• 1999: Je m’en vais, Jean Echenoz (English: I’m Gone; UK: I’m Off)
• 1998: Confidence pour confidence, Paule Constant (English: Trading Secrets)
• 1997: La Bataille, Patrick Rambaud (English: The Battle)
• 1996: Le Chasseur Zéro, Pascale Roze
• 1995: Le Testament français, Andreï Makine (English: Dreams of My Russian Summers)
• 1994: Un aller simple, Didier van Cauwelaert (English: One-Way)
• 1993: Le Rocher de Tanios, Amin Maalouf (English: The Rock of Tanios)
• 1992: Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau (English: Texaco)
• 1991: Les Filles du Calvaire, Pierre Combescot
• 1990: Les Champs d’honneur, Jean Rouaud (English: Fields of Glory)

1980s

• 1989: Un grand pas vers le bon Dieu, Jean Vautrin
• 1988: L’Exposition coloniale, Erik Orsenna (English: Love and Empire)
• 1987: La Nuit sacrée, Tahar Ben Jelloun (English: The Sacred Night)
• 1986: Valet de nuit, Michel Host
• 1985: Les Noces barbares, Yann Queffélec (English: The Wedding)
• 1984: L’Amant, Marguerite Duras (English: The Lover)
• 1983: Les Égarés, Frédérick Tristan (English: The Lost Ones)
• 1982: Dans la main de l’ange, Dominique Fernandez
• 1981: Anne Marie, Lucien Bodard
• 1980: Le Jardin d’acclimatation, Yves Navarre (English: Cronus’ Children)

1970s

• 1979: Pélagie-la-Charrette, Antonine Maillet (English: Pélagie: The Return to Acadie)
• 1978: Rue des Boutiques obscures, Patrick Modiano (English: Missing Person)
• 1977: John l’Enfer, Didier Decoin
• 1976: Les Flamboyants, Patrick Grainville
• 1975: La Vie devant soi, Émile Ajar, the pseudonym of Romain Gary (English: Momo, later The Life Before Us)
• 1974: La Dentellière, Pascal Lainé (English: A Web of Lace, later The Lacemaker)
• 1973: L’Ogre, Jacques Chessex (English: A Father’s Love, later The Tyrant)
• 1972: L’Épervier de Maheux, Jean Carrière
• 1971: Les Bêtises, Jacques Laurent
• 1970: Le Roi des Aulnes, Michel Tournier (English: The Erl-King; US: The Ogre)

1960s

• 1969: Creezy, Félicien Marceau (English: Creezy)
• 1968: Les Fruits de l’hiver, Bernard Clavel (English: The Fruits of Winter)
• 1967: La Marge, André Pieyre de Mandiargues (English: The Margin)
• 1966: Oublier Palerme, Edmonde Charles-Roux (English: To Forget Palermo)
• 1965: L’Adoration, Jacques Borel (English: The Bond)
• 1964: L’État sauvage, Georges Conchon
• 1963: Quand la mer se retire, Armand Lanoux
• 1962: Les Bagages de sable, Anna Langfus (English: The Lost Shore)
• 1961: La Pitié de Dieu, Jean Cau (English: The Mercy of God)
• 1960: Dieu est né en exil, Vintilă Horia (English: God Was Born in Exile); voted but never formally conferred, after a press campaign over the author’s far-right past

1950s

• 1959: Le Dernier des Justes, André Schwarz-Bart (English: The Last of the Just)
• 1958: Saint-Germain ou la Négociation, Francis Walder
• 1957: La Loi, Roger Vailland (English: The Law)
• 1956: Les Racines du ciel, Romain Gary (English: The Roots of Heaven)
• 1955: Les Eaux mêlées, Roger Ikor
• 1954: Les Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir (English: The Mandarins)
• 1953: Les Bêtes, Pierre Gascar
• 1952: Léon Morin, prêtre, Béatrix Beck (English: The Priest; US: The Passionate Heart)
• 1951: Le Rivage des Syrtes, Julien Gracq, who refused the prize (English: The Opposing Shore)
• 1950: Les Jeux sauvages, Paul Colin (English: Savage Play)

1940s

• 1949: Week-end à Zuydcoote, Robert Merle (English: Weekend at Zuydcoote)
• 1948: Les Grandes Familles, Maurice Druon (English: The Rise of Simon Lachaume)
• 1947: Les Forêts de la nuit, Jean-Louis Curtis (English: The Forests of the Night)
• 1946: Histoire d’un fait divers, Jean-Jacques Gautier
• 1945: Mon village à l’heure allemande, Jean-Louis Bory
• 1944: Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs, Elsa Triolet, awarded in 1945 (English: A Fine of Two Hundred Francs)
• 1943: Passage de l’homme, Marius Grout (English: When the Man Passed By)
• 1942: Pareils à des enfants, Marc Bernard
• 1941: Vent de mars, Henri Pourrat
• 1940: Les Grandes Vacances, Francis Ambrière, held back and awarded in 1946 (English: The Long Holiday)

1930s

• 1939: Les Enfants gâtés, Philippe Hériat
• 1938: L’Araigne, Henri Troyat
• 1937: Faux passeports, Charles Plisnier
• 1936: L’Empreinte du dieu, Maxence Van der Meersch (English: Hath Not the Potter)
• 1935: Sang et Lumières, Joseph Peyré
• 1934: Capitaine Conan, Roger Vercel (English: Captain Conan)
• 1933: La Condition humaine, André Malraux (English: Man’s Fate)
• 1932: Les Loups, Guy Mazeline (English: The Wolves)
• 1931: Mal d’amour, Jean Fayard (English: Desire)
• 1930: Malaisie, Henri Fauconnier (English: The Soul of Malaya)

1920s

• 1929: L’Ordre, Marcel Arland
• 1928: Un homme se penche sur son passé, Maurice Constantin-Weyer (English: A Man Scans His Past)
• 1927: Jérôme 60° latitude nord, Maurice Bedel (English: Jerome; or, The Latitude of Love)
• 1926: Le Supplice de Phèdre, Henri Deberly
• 1925: Raboliot, Maurice Genevoix
• 1924: Le Chèvrefeuille, le Purgatoire, le Chapitre XIII, Thierry Sandre
• 1923: Rabevel ou le Mal des ardents, Lucien Fabre
• 1922: Le Vitriol de lune and Le Martyre de l’obèse, Henri Béraud
• 1921: Batouala, René Maran (English: Batouala)
• 1920: Nêne, Ernest Pérochon (English: Nêne)

1910s

• 1919: À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Marcel Proust (English: Within a Budding Grove, later In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
• 1918: Civilisation, Georges Duhamel (English: Civilization)
• 1917: La Flamme au poing, Henry Malherbe (English: The Flame That Is France)
• 1916: Le Feu, Henri Barbusse (English: Under Fire)
• 1915: Gaspard, René Benjamin (English: Private Gaspard)
• 1914: L’Appel du sol, Adrien Bertrand, awarded in 1916 (English: The Call of the Soil)
• 1913: Le Peuple de la mer, Marc Elder
• 1912: Filles de la pluie, André Savignon
• 1911: Monsieur des Lourdines, Alphonse de Châteaubriant (English: The Keynote)
• 1910: De Goupil à Margot, Louis Pergaud

1900s

• 1909: En France, Marius-Ary Leblond, the joint pen name of two cousins from Réunion
• 1908: Écrit sur de l’eau, Francis de Miomandre
• 1907: Terres lorraines and Jean des Brebis ou le Livre de la misère, Émile Moselly
• 1906: Dingley, l’illustre écrivain, Jérôme and Jean Tharaud
• 1905: Les Civilisés, Claude Farrère
• 1904: La Maternelle, Léon Frapié
• 1903: Force ennemie, John-Antoine Nau (English: Enemy Force)

The Verdicts That Made the Prize Famous

The Goncourt’s history is told as much through its quarrels as through its winners. The first great storm came in 1919, when the jury chose Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs over Roland Dorgelès’s war novel Les Croix de bois by six votes to four. A nation fresh from the trenches thought the prize had gone to an aesthete instead of a soldier; time has settled the argument in Proust’s favor. In 1932 the opposite happened: Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, the most explosive French novel of its decade, lost by the same margin to Guy Mazeline’s Les Loups, a verdict still cited whenever the prize’s judgment is questioned.

Other episodes belong to the prize’s legend. In 1921 René Maran became the first Black writer to win, with Batouala, whose preface attacked French colonial rule. In 1941 the Vichy authorities intervened to steer the prize toward the rural regionalist Henri Pourrat; the 1940 prize was held back for a prisoner of war and given in 1946, and Elsa Triolet, honored for 1944 in the summer of 1945, became the first woman to win. In 1951 Julien Gracq, who had attacked the prize system in a pamphlet, refused the award for Le Rivage des Syrtes, the only laureate to do so. And in 1975 the jury crowned an unknown young writer named Émile Ajar for La Vie devant soi, not knowing that Ajar was Romain Gary, who had already won in 1956; the hoax was revealed only after Gary’s death, and it remains the single exception to the rule of one prize per author.

The absences are as telling as the winners. Thirteen women have taken the Goncourt in more than a hundred and twenty years, among them Simone de Beauvoir in 1954, Marguerite Duras in 1984, Marie NDiaye in 2009, Leïla Slimani in 2016 and Brigitte Giraud in 2022, and the Prix Femina was founded in 1904 by women writers in direct reply to the Goncourt’s all-male choices. Colette, Sartre and Camus never won it; nor did Annie Ernaux, whose books stand outside the prize’s taste for the novel, and who received the Nobel Prize in 2022.

Goncourt Winners to Read in English

A century of laureates includes many books forgotten even in France, and a few among the essential novels of their age. The fifteen below are all available in English.

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919)

The second volume of In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator from his adolescent love for Gilberte to a summer at the seaside resort of Balbec, where he first sees the band of girls among whom is Albertine. What the book is really about is the way desire manufactures the person it desires: the girls on the esplanade are at first a single shimmering mass, and the narrator’s attention gradually carves individuals out of it, with no guarantee that the person he chooses resembles the one he imagines. It reached English as Within a Budding Grove in C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation and, more accurately titled, in James Grieve’s of 2002.

André Malraux, Man’s Fate (1933)

Set during the crushed Communist insurrection in Shanghai in 1927, Malraux’s novel follows a group of revolutionaries, among them Kyo, Ch’en and Kyo’s father, the opium-smoking scholar Gisors, as the cause they serve is betrayed from both sides. Its subject is metaphysical: each character is looking for a way to escape the solitude of being human, through terror, love, sacrifice or drugs, and the revolution matters chiefly as the arena where that search is tested. Haakon M. Chevalier’s translation appeared within a year of the prize.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins (1954)

Beauvoir’s long novel of the Paris left after the Liberation turns on two writers, Henri Perron and Robert Dubreuilh, and Dubreuilh’s wife Anne, a psychoanalyst whose love affair with an American novelist runs through the book. Its real question is what a writer owes the truth when the truth is politically inconvenient, and the debate over whether to publish evidence of the Soviet labor camps gives that question a weight no later novel about intellectuals has matched. Leonard M. Friedman translated it; our guide to Simone de Beauvoir’s books places it among her essays and memoirs.

Romain Gary, The Life Before Us (1975)

Momo, an Arab boy in the Belleville district of Paris, is raised by Madame Rosa, an aging Jewish former prostitute and survivor of Auschwitz who takes in the children of women working the streets; as she declines, Momo cares for her. Gary wrote it under a false name, and the disguise is the key: freed from his reputation, a celebrated sixty-year-old novelist found a child’s voice of such comic, wounded tenderness that the jury took him for a newcomer. Ralph Manheim’s translation first appeared as Momo. His first winner, The Roots of Heaven (1956), an early ecological novel about saving Africa’s elephants, is in Jonathan Griffin’s translation.

Michel Tournier, The Erl-King (1970)

Abel Tiffauges, a Paris garage mechanic, is taken prisoner in 1940 and carried into East Prussia, where his fascination with carrying children leads him at last to serve a Nazi elite school, recruiting boys for the Reich. Tournier’s argument, made through myth rather than history, is that the ogre of the fairy tale and the totalitarian state feed on the same hunger, and that innocence of intention is no protection from complicity. It is said to be the only Goncourt ever decided unanimously. Barbara Bray translated it; in the United States it is The Ogre.

Patrick Modiano, Missing Person (1978)

A detective named Guy Roland, who has lost all memory of his life before the war, sets out through Paris to discover who he was, following photographs, addresses and half-remembered names back toward the years of the Occupation. The investigation never quite resolves, and that is Modiano’s point: the past survives only as fragments, and identity is a reconstruction rather than a possession. Daniel Weissbort translated it. Modiano received the Nobel Prize in 2014, one of the few Goncourt laureates on our list of Nobel Prize in Literature winners.

Marguerite Duras, The Lover (1984)

A fifteen-year-old French girl in colonial Indochina crosses the Mekong on a ferry and meets a wealthy Chinese man from Cholon who becomes her lover. Duras, then seventy, returned to material she had used before and wrote it again as fractured memory, and what the book is about is the act of remembering itself: its famous early sentence in Barbara Bray’s translation, “Very early in my life it was too late,” announces a narrator who knows her story is being made as it is told.

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (1992)

Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the founder of a shantytown called Texaco on the edge of Fort-de-France in Martinique, tells an urban planner sent to clear it the story of her family from slavery to the present. Chamoiseau’s argument lives in his language: a French remade by Creole rhythm and vocabulary, insisting that the history of the Caribbean must be told in its own voice or not at all. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov translated it.

Jean Echenoz, I’m Gone (1999)

Félix Ferrer, a Paris art dealer, walks out on his wife and sets off for the Arctic to recover a cargo of Inuit antiquities from a ship trapped in the ice, only to see it stolen on his return. Echenoz, the stylist of Éditions de Minuit, treats the adventure plot with a deadpan irony so precise that the comedy becomes a portrait of emptiness. Mark Polizzotti translated it; the British edition is I’m Off.

Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones (2006)

Maximilien Aue, a cultivated SS officer, narrates his war in nearly a thousand pages, from the mass shootings in Ukraine through Stalingrad, Auschwitz and the fall of Berlin. The novel’s provocation is to deny the reader the comfort of the monster: Aue is educated, articulate and repellent, and the book insists that the machinery of genocide was staffed by people capable of reasoning about it. Littell, born in New York, writes in French. Charlotte Mandell translated it.

Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory (2010)

Jed Martin, a withdrawn artist, becomes famous for photographing Michelin road maps and then for painting portraits of people at work, among them a writer called Michel Houellebecq, who is later murdered. Beneath the satire of the art market lies its author’s most tender book, a meditation on what survives of a life once the market has priced it. Gavin Bowd translated it.

Pierre Lemaitre, The Great Swindle (2013)

Two survivors of the trenches, the gentle accountant Albert Maillard and Édouard Péricourt, whose face has been destroyed by a shell, launch a fraud selling war memorials that will never be built, while their former officer profits from the reburial of the dead. Lemaitre, until then a crime writer, makes the aftermath of 1918 his subject, arguing that a nation which grieved so publicly was also busy turning its dead into money. Frank Wynne translated it; the film version is See You Up There.

Leïla Slimani, Lullaby (2016)

The novel opens with the death of two children and then goes back to show how Louise, the perfect nanny of a Paris couple, came to kill them. Slimani’s real subject is not the crime but the arrangement that preceded it: the intimacy and invisibility of paid domestic work, and a household that could not see the woman who ran it. Sam Taylor translated it; in the United States it is The Perfect Nanny.

Éric Vuillard, The Order of the Day (2017)

A meeting of twenty-four German industrialists with Hitler’s government in February 1933 opens Vuillard’s account of the road to the Anschluss, which includes a long farewell lunch in London with Ribbentrop. Strictly it is a short narrative history, a récit, rather than a novel, and the Goncourt’s choice of it was a statement in itself. Its argument is that catastrophe is assembled in offices, at dinners and in polite meetings by people who could have refused. Mark Polizzotti translated it, and it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men (2021)

A young Senegalese writer in Paris becomes obsessed with a vanished African novelist hailed in 1938 as a “Black Rimbaud” and destroyed by a plagiarism scandal, and follows his trail from Senegal and Paris to Amsterdam and Buenos Aires. Sarr’s question is what the French literary world has done to the African writers it admired and then discarded, and his answer is a novel of extraordinary reach. Lara Vergnaud translated it. Our guide to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s books covers it and his three other novels.

The Goncourt and the Other Autumn Prizes

The Goncourt sits at the center of a crowded season. The Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française usually opens it in late October; the Prix Femina, with its all-female jury, and the Prix Médicis, founded in 1958 to reward novels of new or adventurous style, follow within days, and the Médicis has also given a prize for a foreign novel since 1970. The Prix Renaudot is announced at Drouant moments after the Goncourt, and the Interallié closes the round. A book may win more than one: Andreï Makine’s Le Testament français took both the Goncourt and the Médicis in 1995.

A Prize for the French Language, Not Only for France

The common complaint against the Goncourt is that its jurors are too close to the great Paris publishers and too fond of safe, well-made realism, and the record gives the charge some support: most early laureates are forgotten, and Gallimard alone has published dozens of winners. The stronger case for the prize lies elsewhere. Read in order, the list is a record of the French language outgrowing France. Maran’s Batouala in 1921, the Belgian Charles Plisnier in 1937, the Acadian Antonine Maillet in 1979, the Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun in 1987, the Martinican Chamoiseau in 1992, the Lebanese Amin Maalouf in 1993, the Siberian-born Makine in 1995, the Afghan-born Atiq Rahimi in 2008, and then Slimani, Sarr and Daoud: decade by decade, the academy has acknowledged that the best French fiction is often written by people for whom France is one home among several, or a language rather than a country. Read that way, the prize is one of the surest routes into the French-language strand of world literature.

The Cheque on the Wall

A prize that pays ten euros cannot be about money, and the Goncourt never quite has been. Its real currency is attention: the red band, the crowd at the foot of the staircase, the argument that begins on a November afternoon and runs for weeks. The list above records a century of that argument, its errors as plainly as its triumphs, and the reader who works through its best books will find Proust beside Duras, Malraux beside Sarr, and the French novel steadily opening its doors. The framed cheques in all those studies are a small, private joke between the academy and its winners. The books are the part meant for everyone else.