Senegal’s Mohamed Mbougar Sarr wins top French literary prize
The Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has become the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.
The award, announced on Wednesday at the Drouant restaurant near the Opéra Garnier in Paris, was hailed as “symbolic” by the French literary establishment, 100 years after the prize – presented since 1867 – was first won by a Black author.
L’Express magazine said the award crowned “the revelation of the literary year”, a “shining proof of the vitality and universality of the French language”. Le Monde said the “impressive ambition and stunning energy” of Sarr’s novel “carried all before it”.
The decision comes amid an increasingly bitter culture war in France in the run-up to next year’s presidential elections, with the far-right polemicist Éric Zemmour recently calling for a ban on “non-French” names such as Muhammad.
“I feel, quite simply, enormous joy,” said Mbougar Sarr, 31, who is the youngest winner of the Goncourt since 1976. The eldest of a family of seven boys, the son of a doctor, he grew up 100 miles from Dakar before moving to France to study literature.
His novel, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men), tells the story of a young Senegalese writer living in Paris who stumbles by chance across a novel published in 1938 by a fictional African author named TC Elimane, nicknamed “the Black Rimbaud” by an ecstatic Paris media.
The story, described as a reflection on the links between fiction and reality, echoes the real-life experience of the Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, who in 1968 became the first African winner of another celebrated French literary prize, the Prix Renaudot, but was later accused of plagiarism, fled France and vanished from public life.
“With this young author, we have returned to the fundamentals of the Goncourt,” said Philippe Claudel, a member of the jury. “Thirty-one years old – he has a few books ahead of him. Let’s hope this award will not dampen his desire to write them.”
The jury of seven men and three women “made its mind up on the first vote – there was not need for a second round”, said another jury member, Paule Constant. “This book is written in flamboyant style. It’s a hymn to literature.”
This year’s award was tainted by a judging scandal when it emerged that the shortlist included a book by the boyfriend of one of the judges, who had written a scathing review of one of the other contenders for the prize.
The Prix Goncourt is worth just €10 but guarantees renown and massive book sales. Previous winners, who include Marcel Proust, André Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras, have seen novels rack up sales of 400,000 copies. Last year’s winner, Hervé Le Tellier, sold more than a million.
The rival Prix Renaudot, widely seen as the runner-up award to the Goncourt, this year went to the prolific French-speaking Belgian novelist Amélie Nothomb for Premier sang (First Blood), dedicated to her father who died last year.
