The ten Goncourt jurors vote on Monday November 4 to choose the winner of the most prestigious French literary prize, with Kamel Daoud and Gaël Faye as favorites to succeed Jean-Baptiste Andrea. There remain four contenders, these two writers, one who was a journalist and the other who is a singer, and two novelists who appear as outsiders, Sandrine Collette, and Hélène Gaudy.
For more than a century, the decision has been made at lunchtime at the Drouant restaurant, in the Opera district of Paris.
Kamel Daoud, 54-year-old Franco-Algerian, with Houris (Gallimard edition), fiction on the massacres of “black decade” Algerian (1992-2002), was designated by five of the six literary journalists interviewed by Weekly Books as the most likely winner. “Kamel Daoud will have it, for reasons not literary but political”according to an editor who spoke on condition of anonymity to AFP. Algeria’s decision to ban Gallimard Editions from the Algiers International Book Fair, from November 6 to 16, seems to work in its favor, in a very tense diplomatic context between France and Algeria.
But he has a serious competitor in the person of Gaël Faye, 42, with Jacaranda (ed. Grasset), another fiction, this one on the reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.
What the two authors have in common is not only having success in bookstores during this literary season but having already been finalists at the Goncourt, respectively in 2014 and 2016. Kamel Daoud, with Meursault, counter-investigationthen won the Goncourt prize for the first novel, while Gaël Faye, with Small country, the Goncourt of high school students.
Sandrine Collette, 54 years old, with Madelaine before dawn (editions JC Lattès) and Hélène Gaudy, 45 years old, with Archipelagos (editions of L’Olivier), arrive at this stage for the first time. Their novels have attracted attention with the quality of their style but are published by publishers who are less influential with the jury, and moreover do not have as strong a political impact. The media have expressed their preference. Daily life The Parisian said at the beginning of September that he had a weakness for Sandrine Collette’s book, “magnificent and poetic, very hard but sometimes luminous”. The magazine Telerama leaned on Sunday for “the beautiful, limpid and serious novel by Gaël Faye”.
The Goncourt 2024 is the first awarded under the presidency of Philippe Claudel. Elected to this position in May, this writer said he wanted “to be a democratic president, of whom the jurors can be proud”. He made it clear that he would do everything possible to ensure that the Goncourt Academy does not repeat the scenario of 2022 and 2023, namely 14 rounds of voting, the maximum planned, due to a persistent tie with five votes against five .
Beyond the pride of adding one’s name to the list, the Goncourt Prize is an economic issue. He is rewarded with a check for ten euros that the winners traditionally choose to frame. But above all, it makes it possible to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a book that many readers will be curious to discover or offer, and it opens the way to numerous translations throughout the world.
If Kamel Daoud or Gaël Faye were to lose, both have another prize in sight, the Renaudot, traditionally awarded at the same place, just after. These two authors are finalists, along with Élisabeth Barillé (The Sisters and other living species), Antoine Choplin (The Boat of Masao) and Olivier Norek (The Winter Warriors).
