Brigitte Giraud turns into thirteenth lady to win Prix Goncourt | Books

For less than the thirteenth time in 120 years, France’s oldest and most celebrated literary award the Prix Goncourt was received by a lady on Thursday.

Brigitte Giraud, 56, a French author of novels and brief tales was declared winner with Vivre Vite (Stay Quick) after the jury voted 14 occasions.

After a ultimate vote led to stalemate, the president of the Goncourt Academy forged a deciding vote, selecting Giraud over her closest rival Giuliano da Empoli.

Vivre Vite is a brief autobiographical story through which Giraud recounts the chain of occasions resulting in the demise of her husband Claude in a motorcycle accident in 1999, leaving her with a younger son and a lately signed contract to purchase a brand new household dwelling.

“Accident, transfer, funeral,” she writes in an account laden with anger and regret and punctuated by the everlasting questions of why, how and what if.

“When no catastrophe happens, we transfer ahead with out trying again, we stare straight forward on the horizon. When a tragedy happens, we flip again, we come again to hang-out the place, we proceed to the reconstruction. We need to perceive the origin of every gesture, every determination. We rewind 100 occasions. You turn out to be a specialist in trigger and impact. We monitor down, we dissect, we post-mortem. We need to know every thing about human nature, the intimate and collective forces that make what occurs occur,” Giraud writes.

Da Empoli, 49, had been tipped to win this yr’s Goncourt for his e-book, Le Mage du Kremlin (The Kremlin’s Sorcerer), an account of the final 30 years in Russia underneath Vladimir Putin, that has offered practically 100,000 copies because it was revealed six months in the past. Da Empoli received the Grand Prix du Roman, one other of France’s prestigious literary prizes earlier this yr.

Haitian novelist Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s e-book Milwaukee Blues, revealed in 2021, and Cloé Korman’s Les Presque Soeurs (The Nearly Sisters) had been additionally on the four-book shortlist.

In 2007, Giraud, a former journalist, received the Goncort prize for a newcomer for L’Amour est très surestimé (Love could be very overestimated).

The Goncourt, France’s oldest and most celebrated literary award, is introduced every November after the 10-member Goncourt Academy jury – made up of three girls and 7 males – get pleasure from a standard lunch of lamb stew and olives on the Drouant restaurant close to the Opéra Garnier in Paris.

The prize is value simply €10 however ensures renown and big e-book gross sales. Most winners desire to border reasonably than money their Goncourt cheque.

Earlier winners, who embrace Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Elsa Triolet, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras, have seen novels rack up gross sales of 400,000 copies.