PARIS, Nov 5 — Writer Laurent Mauvignier yesterday won France’s top literary award, the Goncourt, for his family saga spanning the 20th century and recounting the story of his grandmother accused of collaborating during World War II.
Just one round of voting sufficed for the jury to select the 58-year-old author for his opus La Maison Vide (“The Empty House), inspired by stories he heard about his paternal family throughout his childhood.
“I’m overjoyed,” Mauvignier said as he received the prize.
It’s “a huge reward because it’s a book that comes from (my) childhood and spans several generations”, he added.
The prestigious Goncourt prize usually generates book sales in the hundreds of thousands for the winning author.
But the prize money is a meagre cheque for 10 euros (US$11) that usually ends up framed on the wall rather than cashed in.
Mauvignier grew up in a working-class family in Touraine, a rural region in western France.
“The Empty House” recounts the tale of several generations living in an imaginary town in Touraine, showing vast similarities to the one he grew up in.
“I think my family story resembles that of millions of French people, with its areas of shadow and more glorious parts,” he has told AFP.
The story begins with Marie-Ernestine, a young woman forced to marry a man she does not love and abandon her dreams of becoming a professional pianist.
The child born of this unhappy marriage in 1913 was the writer’s mysterious grandmother Marguerite.
Mauvignier told France Inter radio last month that he heard about Marguerite from his mother, because his father was of a generation of men who did not talk.
The author said he especially remembered learning that as a child, his father had seen his mother Marguerite have her head shaved at the end of World War II.
At the time, the practice was a common punishment for women accused of collaborating with the Nazis during the German occupation of France.
Learning of the incident “has haunted me since childhood”, he told France Inter.
The author said on Tuesday that he had received countless messages from readers who seemed to care about the story almost more than he did.
Mauvignier’s previous books translated into English include a thriller set in rural France called The Birthday Party.
He also wrote The Wound, a novel exploring the legacy of the Algerian war of independence, and In the Crowd, set in the run-up to the 1985 football fan crush at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium that killed 39 people.
Mauvignier had been vying for the Goncourt against fellow French writer and scriptwriter Emmanuel Carrere, Mauritian-French writer Nathacha Appanah, and Belgian author Caroline Lamarche. — AFP
